I find Tim Hortons coffee too hot to hold especially while drinking and driving. Yes, I drink coffee and drive. It’s not against the law. When I make my coffee order at Tim Horton’s drive thru in the morning I would ask for ‘Double Cup’. The optimum brewing temperature of coffee is 90′c which is pretty much close to boiling. This is too hot for me to hold.

I often wondered why Tim Horton’s doesn’t have coffee sleeves. Today I think I figured out why.

IT’S NOT COST EFFECTIVE. It’s better to employ double cup. Take a look at this price chart at a restaurant supplies store.

Look at the price of Coffee sleeves. It’s is $37.99 for a box of 1000s. Take a look at the price of 1000s cups. It around the same price! Therefore, if Tim Hortons have coffee sleeves in the store probably about 25%* of the patrons would use it. Currently, probably about 5% of the patrons would ask for Double Cup. Hence, it’s better to not use sleeves and let the customers ask for Double Cup.

*number is educated guess. When I worked at Starbucks, 95% of patrons use coffee sleeves. 25% is a low end guess.

CRU on TSX.

Cup and Handle pattern has been forming since lat November 2009, about 4 months.

Measured Target
Measure the height from the right cup lip to the lowest valley then multiply by the above “percentage meeting price target.”

Cup and Handle pattern setups

• Right lip resistance is at $0.41.
• 4 months long
• handle took 2 weeks to form
• Right lip is higher then left lip
• U shaped
• small volume going down the handle
• large volume going up the handle
• 200 day Moving Average is at .40 which is right at the resistance.  Crossing MA200 is another bullish signal.

Measured target price is $1.11 – $1.51

$0.11 –> $0.41 = 271%

From the bottom of the cup to the height right cup lip: $0.11 –> $0.41  (272%)

The resistance line for breakout is $0.41.  There the target price is $0.41  (272%)  = $1.52.

I wrote a quick php script to download all the stock charts from a defined list, make web service calls to stockcharts.com and display the picture.  A quick way to see many charts at a glance.

http://yadakhov.com/dow30

Here’s one for the S&P TSX 60 which has the largest 60 Canadian companies.

http://yadakhov.com/tsx60

1.  Gmail doesn’t look at ‘period’ in the email.

johnsmith@gmail.com
john.smith@gmail.com
j.o.h.n.smith@gmail.com

Is all the same emails.  Email sent to any of the address will be forwarded to the same email account.

This is a neat way to sign up for multiple accounts at some other service that requires unique email.  I found that out on my own because I have a period in my email and saw some email coming to me without the period.

2.  The second trick, I read on lifehacker is to use the plus sign trick.

Example: You could use
johnsmith+nytimes@gmail.com for nytimes.com
johnsmith+freestuff@gmail.com for freestuff.com

Gmail will automatically remove everything including the plus sign.

A developer was trying to compute the average of the first 100 records with LIMIT:

SELECT
  avg(con_hits) as avg_hits
FROM
  content
WHERE
  con_type = 1
  AND con_posttime < $twelve_hrs_ago
  AND con_refresh = 0
ORDER BY
  con_posttime DESC
LIMIT 100

Can you spot the subtle bug in the above query?

LIMIT is applied to the resultset, after AVG is calculated. The correct way is to use a subselect and apply the aggregate function:

SELECT avg(con_hits) as avg_hits
FROM (
  SELECT con_hits
  FROM content
  WHERE
    con_type = 1
    AND con_posttime < $twelve_hrs_ago
    AND con_refresh = 0
  ORDER BY con_posttime DESC
  LIMIT 100
) x;

It is just me, or does it seem that Javascript is getting a lot of buzz lately.  I remember reading resume tips such as “Don’t write Javascript on your resume because it is not really a language.”  Boy, how have the tide change?  Why is it that the Ninja label is binded to Javascript guru and no other languages?

Javascript is like chess.  It is easy to learn and hard to master.   Recently though I have heard people talk about JavaScript as an “application language”.  I understand that applications like Gmail have taken JavaScript to the next stage of evolution and have made the browser much more like a full-featured application. But as far as I know, there are no server-side technologies like the ones I mentioned earlier that are JavaScript based. So even in the case of a Rich Internet Application, the “application language” is really the one on the backend that interacts with the database and performs URL routing, etc.

With framework such as jQuery, mootool and scriptaculous Javascript becomes more usable.

This is a really good question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/329289/really-wow-them-in-the-interview

It represents my current frustrations.

Need to pull myself by the bootstrap and improve.

NetTuts is a great website to learn about web development.  It would have save me hours reading thought textbooks and online manual if this website existed 5 years ago.  Nevertheless, the website is great to pick up new technology quickly.

http://net.tutsplus.com/

I espececially like their getting started with Code Igniter series.

* Jeffrey Way’s CodeIgniter From Scratch: Day 1, Nettuts.com – Getting Started With the Framework
* Jeffrey Way’s CodeIgniter From Scratch: Day 2, Nettuts.com – Database Selecting Methods
* Jeffrey Way’s CodeIgniter From Scratch: Day 3, Nettuts.com – Sending Emails
* Jeffrey Way’s CodeIgniter From Scratch: Day 4, Nettuts.com – Newsletter Signup
* Jeffrey Way’s CodeIgniter From Scratch: Day 5, Nettuts.com – CRUD
* Jeffrey Way’s CodeIgniter From Scratch: Day 6, Nettuts.com – Login
* Jeffrey Way’s CodeIgniter From Scratch: Day 7, Nettuts.com – Pagination
* Burak Guzel’s CodeIgniter From Scratch: Day 8, Nettuts.com – AJAX

I find that I’ve been using C/C++ a lot less these days.  Not by choice, but my the what is needed by companies.  A lot of my projects deal with Internet technologies and on the LAMP stack.  If I need a quick way to parse text  I’ll use PHP which has a great string parsing library.  No need to deal with NULL delimited strings.  Companies are building web application rather than desktop application.  I don’t see C/C++ disappearing any time soon.  The languages are the backbone of operating systems, web servers and lower level utilities.  There just isn’t as much growth in jobs available compare to higher level such as Java, PHP, Ruby and Python.  Proof?  Look at the job trends on indeed.com.

When I was about 12, I began my programming career.  My first programming language was C++.  My dad had an old Intel 286 computer he used to run his spreadsheet software.  It gave me an opportunity to play around with a computer.  I have fond memories of running Borland Turbo C++ and doing some while loop to print consecutive numbers.  Those were the good ol’ days.

After C++, I moved to C because there were a lot of open source software that used C.  The one I was particularly interested in was the Vim text editor.  When I started university back in 2001, the Introductody to Computer Science course use Java.  Coming from C/C++, Java wasn’t too hard to pick up.  It was just before the dotcom burst and Java the the hot word du jour. In third year of the CS progrom courses such as OS and Compilers use C, my knowledge came in handy.

I’m glad I started my programming career using a low level programming language such as C/C++.  For one, it gives me a greater appreciation why higher level languages such as Java, PHP, Perl, and Python were invented.  An advice by Joelonsoftware for college graduates “Learn C before graduation.”

As technology advances, we continue to build layer of abstraction to hide the lower level and give programmers for productivity. Lately, I’ve been using PHP a lot development and love how the language implements Arrays. I don’t think people fully appreciate just how easy and useful Arrays in PHP are. PHP Arrays act as lists, maps, stacks and generic data structures all at the same time. Arrays are implemented in the language core and are used all over the place which results in good CPU cache locality. Perl and Python both use separate language constructs for lists and maps resulting in more copying and potentially confusing transformations.

Doing some review on C++, I stumble upon a funny post.  Funny in a geeky sort of way.

The little-known operator “–>”

“After reading this post on comp.lang.c++.moderated, I was completely surprised that it compiled and worked in both VS 2008 and G++ 4.4. The code:”

#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
     int x = 10;
     while( x --> 0 ) // x goes to 0
     { // prints 10 9 8 7 .. 0
       printf("%d ", x);
     }
}

It's amusing because there is no such thing as "GOES TO" operator in C.  It actually a combination of two operators, -- and >.  It is decrementing x and then comparing x and 0 with the > operator.  The while loop is a lot clearer if written with parenthese: 

while( (x--) > 0 ) // x goes to 0

I earned my second “Nice Answer” badge on a Stack Overflow question.  I, myself, don’t find using switch all that useful.  The syntax for switches are always harder to remember compared to chaining a bunch of if else statements.  There are just a few times when switches do come in handy such as finding the number of days in a month.  The answer was well received because it is written in a syntax familiar to all C-like languages.

StackOverflow Question

Answer:

There are a few cases where switch is more readable and comes in handy. Usually when you have grouping of options.

Here is one of them:

    int numDays = 0;
    int month = 2;
    int year = 2010;

    switch (month) {
        case 1:
        case 3:
        case 5:
        case 7:
        case 8:
        case 10:
        case 12:
            numDays = 31;
            break;
        case 4:
        case 6:
        case 9:
        case 11:
            numDays = 30;
            break;
        case 2:
            if ( ((year % 4 == 0) && !(year % 100 == 0))
                 || (year % 400 == 0) )
                numDays = 29;
            else
                numDays = 28;
            break;
        default:
            System.out.println("Invalid month.");
     }