Tag Archives: Computers

I’ve been working on instant messaging software for seven years, so I’ve been exposed to a lot of IM protocols. The “protocol” is the structure of bytes that gets sent back and forth between your computer and the IM service. … Continue reading →

Last.fm’s audio scrobbler has an option that “scrobbles” a track after to listening to anywhere between 50% to 100% of the song. So the song is considered listened to if you only listen to 4:30 of a 5 minute song. … Continue reading →

From Firefox I learned that applications should always save their state. When you close and restart an application is should restore its state to what it was previously. Open windows, open documents, which text was highlighted, how far down you’ve … Continue reading →

Google recently made a few changes to the buttons in Gmail. Here’s a before and after comparison: But they got two things wrong: The mouse cursor doesn’t change when hovering over the new buttons. With the old buttons the cursor … Continue reading →

These are the warnings that Firefox 3.0.5 is capable of showing: I once heard someone lament that as soon as a user does a web search and the browser asks “you’re submitting information that’s not encrypted, do you want us … Continue reading →

This whole “computer startup company” thing really is different than what I was used to on the east coast. I mean, I had heard about Google and Yahoo! and PayPal and eBay and Amazon and Netscape, but it’s hard to … Continue reading →

Our de facto method for asynchronous programming at Meebo is to use a single thread with non-blocking sockets and some sort of socket watching/readiness notification (poll, select, epoll, libevent, glib’s mainloop, etc). This is what Pidgin does, too. It is … Continue reading →

Usually when you call a function you can determine if there was an error based solely on the return code. But the functions readdir() strtol() and strtoll() are different. For these functions, if you want to know if there was … Continue reading →