zacharyc

Getting Things Done (GTD) has become increasingly popular in past few years. There have been many attempts to build an application that integrates with the whole framework. As a mac user I have been aware of a few, but the big one of the past was Kinkless GTD. This application consists of a bunch of applescripts meant to work with OmniOutliner. There was a lot of hype surrounding the application, and for good reason, it was one of the best options out there. The problem was, it wasn’t good enough for me to get really committed. You had to hit this “sync” button ever couple of seconds to make sure everything was up to date, contexts were confusing, and sometimes the kinkless page would go down for days at a time. Others shared my concerns and now there are several different applications that aim to fill the same gap that KGTD left open. In this article I will be comparing OmniFocus and Things. ...

I have a friend who asked me for a reading list of books. This friend is in a computer related field, but does not have extensive programming background. This could potentially be an issue when applying for jobs, or actually in the job world. In order to help this friend out, I spent some time coming up with a list of books I think should be read by a person in this position. For the purposes of this post I will call my friend Peter. ...

Another Christmas adventure. This year I spent the holiday with my family up in Killingon, VT. My brother put in a movie today called Ski Patrol. It just so happens that this movie, released in 1990 was my absolute favorite movie as kid. I must have seen it about a thousand times. Yet, I hadn’t seen it in nearly 5 years. You know what I learned? 5 years wasn’t long enough, I still knew every word 🙂 It’s okay though, I had a very fun time watching, and it was great to spend some time with the family. Hope everyone else had a great holiday as well. ...

I was in a job interview the other day and someone asked me the following question, which I got wrong. Its not hard to remember, but I figure if I pass it on, and anyone out there who reads this blog for technical content might get a little refresher.The question was something like: write the declaration for an array of function pointers that take an integer and return a double in C. ...

In a recent article at Coding Horror, the author discusses Hash Tables. This is a very strong post on hash tables and their hashing function. It is definitely worth the read, but there is one thing I want to comment on. In the post Jeff Atwood discusses hash tables and states the following: Key-value pairs are quite common in real world data, and hashtables are both reasonably efficient in storage and quite fast at lookups, offering O(1) performance in most cases. That’s why hashtables are the go-to data structure for many programmers. It may not be the optimal choice, but unlike so many things in computer science, it’s rarely a bad choice. ...