Masala programming

Recently I came across some code snippets and it's full of mess, lacking fundamentals, lacking basic code separation... That made me to wonder why some developers aren't learning the basics before trying anything.

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Interview question #2

This is related to PHP's array . An array has number of elements. All elements are integers and unique, which means there is no repetitive integers. (e.g.) $foo = array(7, 5, 9, 13, 2, 8); You have to sort the array, provided: You should scan the elements only once. You're not allowed to compare the elements when sorting. (i.e., you're not supposed to use any comparison operators) Sorted resultant array may not be the source array. How will you do that?

"A to Z of C" in the book Cimple (ISBN 0070260982)

I was just searching "A to Z of C" in Google Books and found that the book Cimple written by Sasant K Rout has used our code. The irony is that the book was published by Tata McGraw-Hill , who rejected us in final stage stating that it wants us to get endorsement from any IIT professor, which we couldn't. (For the sake of record... IIT Bangalore was linking & supporting "A to Z of C" for long time once it's published over the net; see old IIT page from web.archives.org ) It's just another incident to prove that success isn't a measurable unit; even failed attempts can be appreciated in any other forms.

Storing unicode texts in MySQL with phpMyAdmin

Today, I've received a personal mail/request from Sivanantham Hemamalini, working for IT leisure in Singapore. Since I was in company when received the mail, I couldn't answer immediately. If I understand the question right, it is about inputting Unicode texts especially Tamil in phpMyAdmin. PhpMyAdmin 's default characterset is iso-8859-1 and so if we enter anything in the form, browser will convert it into numerical html entities. Say for example, if we enter தமிழ் and submit the form, it will convert it to & #2980;& #2990;& #3007;& #2996;& #3021; . Because of this browser's behavior, it will be difficult to store the Unicode text as it is. Solutions Immediate solution I could think of is changing or forcing the browser's character encoding into utf-8. In Mozilla Firefox, it can be set via View -> Character Encoding -> Unicode (UTF-8) Another elegant solution might be changing the phpMyAdmin configurations so that it send...