An Eye Tracking Study on camelCase and under_score Identifier Styles

"results indicate a significant improvement in time and lower visual effort with the underscore style. The interaction of Experience with Style indicates that novices benefit twice as much with respect to time, with the
underscore style."

Link to the study

Infinite Version is getting meaningless

"Infinite version" was a concept made popular by widespread transition to web applications that could easily be updated continuously. Google implemented the same with Chrome by using a brilliant system for automatic updating through distribution of differences between versions of the application.
One of the consequences was that the age-old rule for software versioning (link) has become pointless as the major versions were increased every couple of weeks without any significant change. Initially there may have been major changes in every new release but, as of late, the rate of those has slowed down. The versioning is now becoming meaningless with updates like the current Dev version of Chrome:

Chromium 31 Is Here, Chrome 31 Is Only Days Away: "Perhaps partially to offset the lack of new features, but mostly because it's tradition by now, the Chromium patch that bumped up the version number also comes with a few trivial facts about the number 31."

The lack of new features is confirmed at Google Chrome Releases blog (link): "This release fixes a number of crashes and other bugs."

The software version number is now just a sequence number to distinguish releases, stripped of any other information about the amount and type of changes included.

Android 4.2 file access from Fedora 19 via MTP. - FedoraForum.org

A life-savior. "simple-mtpfs" mounts Android device over MTP.
Usage: simple-mtpfs
i.e. simple-mtpfs ./temp

-l will list available devices. Can be used as diagnostics to see if the device is connected properly.

Android 4.2 file access from Fedora 19 via MTP. - FedoraForum.org

Ebook Formats, DRM and You — A Guide for the Perplexed | Apprentice Alf’s Blog

A post on how to back up your Kindle (and other digital) books:

Ebook Formats, DRM and You — A Guide for the Perplexed | Apprentice Alf’s Blog

Encode HTML for Blogger posts

http://htmlentities.net/
is a handy service that will encode all the special characters into HTML-encoded ones so that the posts on Blogger, that contain HTML code, will look correct. 

Network issues with Visual Studio 2012

It has been a while since Visual Studio 2012 (with Update 3 currently) reminded me of updates to installed extensions. To see what's going on, today I tried to check for updates manually and was greeted with an error. VS could not check for updates nor connect to online gallery.

The problem was semi-resolved by adjustments to devenv.exe.config file in Common7/IDE directory. (source). In addition to the setting for servicePointManager, I also enabled the defaultProxy. Below are the settings that made the automatic update work again.

<configuration>
  <system.net>
    <defaultProxy enabled="true" />
    <settings>
      <servicePointManager expect100Continue="false" />
    </settings>
  </system.net>
</configuration>

Issue with SwiftKey on Android 4.3

http://support.swiftkey.net/forums/116693-2-bug-reports/suggestions/4260870-android-4-3-update-loses-keyboard-layout?page=6&per_page=20

There is a fix available in the latest beta versions. The download link is in the bug report.

Disable back light on I9100

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2382579&page=99

Or, in brief

#!/sbin/busybox sh
echo "1" > /sys/class/sec/sec_touchkey/force_disable

Is the future already here?

Reminiscence of Tesla in this technology sounds too good to be true. Run an electric vehicle using the energy freely available around us.

More info:
http://peswiki.com/energy/Directory:Ismael_Aviso_Self-Charging_Electric_Car

Checking disk drive under Linux

There is a time when old hard drives start to die out. Here are some tools to help diagnose the issues:

sudo badblocks -v /dev/sda > bad-blocks

Does a read-only check for bad blocks and outputs a file (bad-blocks in this case) with the list of the bad blocks found. The parameter can be a whole disk (as above) or any of the partitions. In case of a partition, use /dev/sda5, instead /dev/sda, for example.

sudo fsck -t ext4 -l bad-blocks /dev/sda

Fsck will read the contents of bad-blocks file and check the reported sectors. After analysis they will be marked as bad.

'Disks' is a GUI utility that displays the drives attached, including the partitions.

Sources:
http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2008/01/howto-check-disk-drive-for-errors-and.html