Input: a sequence of n unsorted numbers

Output: a sequence of permuted n numbers from the input such that those numbers are sorted in most of the time decreasing order.

Image source: “Introduction to Algorithms”, The MIT Press

The image above explains the process used on an array of six numbers, as you can see at the end the result is a sorted array.

How it works

Indexes of numbers in this array are present above the rectangles, their connected values, on the other hand, appear in the rectangles. Have in mind that in C++ indexing starts at zero, and ends at length – 1.
In each iteration, the black rectangle represents the key taken from the current indexed number in for loop, which is being compared with all values in gray rectangles from it’s left. Gray arrows represent moving gray values one position to the right, and black arrow represent moving the key when appropriate.

Code realization

void insertion_sort(int a[], int length){
     int i, j, key;
     for(i = 1; i < length; i++){
               key = a[i];
               j = i - 1;
               while(j >= 0 && a[j] > key){
                     a[j + 1] = a[j];
                     j--;
                     }
             a[j + 1] = key;
             }
     }

This function takes two parameters: the “a” array and the “length” integer that represent the number of it’s elements. It goes through the array as shown on the images and repositions it’s values so that you get a sorted array in decreasing order as an output which can be tested using printf function.

There is also a variant for getting the output in non-decreasing order:

void inverted_insertion_sort(int a[], int length){
     int i, j, key;
     for(i = length - 2; i >= 0; i--){
           key = a[i];
           j = i + 1;
           while(j <= length - 1 && a[j] > key){
                   a[j - 1] = a[j];
                   j++;
                   }
           a[j - 1] = key;
           }
     }

This algorithm is very popular in terms of sorting short arrays, but for more complex situations you should better check out my Algorithms category and find what you need. Also, make sure to understand the code completely buy following through the function with your own example and figuring it out. Good luck!

1. Firebug

Firebug Console

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. It is the world’s most popular front-end development (web design) add-on. In detail, you can see every element’s characteristics like width, length, type, etc.

2. Web Developer

Web Developer

The Web Developer extension adds various web developer tools to a browser. By default, it is displayed as a toolbar in Firefox. It is a place containing all useful shortcuts and tools you could possibly need.

3. FireFTP

FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP/SFTP client for Mozilla Firefox which provides easy and intuitive access to FTP/SFTP servers. With an add-on like FireFTP you don’t have to use other FTP Clients, but access your server without leaving your browser.

4. FirePHP

FirePHP enables you to log to your Firebug Console using a simple PHP method call.

5. HTML Validator

HTML Validator is a Mozilla extension that adds HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. The number of errors of a HTML page is seen on the form of an icon.This is a must-have if you deal with the HTML code a lot, it will check everything for all possible errors like syntax mistakes for example.

6. CSS Usage

CSS Usage

CSS Usage is made to be used with Firebug, that I mentioned earlier. This add-on uncovers unused CSS style rules. It is used for making your CSS files as light as possible.

7. SEO Doctor

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of your website’s most crucial and most important parts if you would like to get some traffic. This is why this add-on is important. It gives you a score between 0% and 100% depending how good your site’s SEO is. It highlights mistakes and tells you how to repair them.

8. YSlow

YSlow analyzes web pages and why they’re slow based on Yahoo!’s rules for high performance web sites.

9. CollorZilla

ColorZilla

Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Gradient Generator and other colorful goodies. You can actually get some of Photoshop’s most useful web design “features” right inside your browser. Like that color? Use CollorZilla and get the RGB code right this instant.

10. MeasureIt

MeasureIt

Draw a ruler across any webpage to check the width, height, or alignment of page elements in pixels.

These are, in my opinion, must-have addons for every serious web designer or developer. If you think that the list is missing something, share it in the comments bellow!

First thing first, enter about:config into Firefox’s awesome bar and press enter…

Mozilla Firefox: about:config

Click “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button in order to continue. Now, you will enter Firefox’s about:config page where you can change all the options you possibly need, remember that you need to be careful doing this otherwise you could crush the browser if you don’t know what you are doing, so do this with caution. As you can see now, there are many preferences available, all these are variables including integers, booleans and strings, and these preferences have values that control how the browser works.

In order to make Firefox faster and more responsive you need to do the following tweaks:

Enable pipelining

Normally, browsers send a request to a web server and then wait for a response in order to continue, enabling pipelining lets your browser send multiple requests even before one response is received. This feature will speed up the total download time of webpages in most cases.

How to enable it?

Firstly, make sure that booleans network.http.pipelining and network.http.proxy.pipelining are set to true. Then set network.http.pipelining.maxrequests integer’s value to 8, you can put even more if you have a faster Internet connection, but setting it to 8 is enough in most cases.

Get the most of rendering speed

When you are downloading a web page Firefox will show what has been downloaded so far every 0.12 seconds. This is too frequent and it will increase the total download time of a web page. Increasing the value that controls this solves the problem.

How to enable it?

You will need to create a new integer (Right click -> New – > Integer) called content.notify.interval which is the preference name, and put a value of 600000. You will also need to create a new boolean (Right click -> New – > Boolean) called content.notify.ontimer set to true.

Make loading faster

If you don’t do anything in 0.75 seconds while the Firefox’s loading process is active, Firefox will enter so called low-frequency mode. It means that Firefox will become less responsive, but your page will load more quickly. Reducing the value of content switch threshold will improve performance, but make Firefox a little less snappier, so don’t overdo it. You can also make Firefox ignoring all user interface request while downloading a page, it will definitely make it faster, but I wouldn’t recommend that since it will make Firefox non-responsive too often.

How to enable it?

You will need to create a new integer (Right click -> New – > Integer) called content.switch.threshold which is the preference name, and put a value of 250000, which stands for quarter of a second. I’m using this value since I want faster loading, if you would like to make Firefox more responsive then use a greater value like 1000000+ which stands for 1+ second. In order to make Firefox ignoring all user interface requests (which I don’t recommend) create a new boolean called content.interrupt.parsing and set it’s value to false.

Other useful tweaks

The tweaks above are the most important in making you web browser Firefox faster, if you would like to go one step ahead apply these quick changes:

• Make sure that network.http.keep-alive is set to true.
• Create new integer named nglayout.initialpaint.delay and set it’s value to 0.
• Create new integer named content.notify.backoffcount and set’s it’s value to 5.
• Create new integer named browser.cache.memory.capacity and set’s it’s value to 4096.
• Create new boolean named browser.cache.memory.enable and set it’s value to true.
• Create new boolean named browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl and set it’s value to true.
• Create new boolean named plugin.expose_full_path and set it’s value to true.
• Create new boolean named config.trim and set it’s value to true.

Maintaining Firefox on daily basis

All these tweaks will make you browser run better, but there are also some things that you can do to prevent Firefox hanging or feeling slow like updating your addons and plugins regularly, clearing history every once in a while, deleting bookmarks and search engines you don’t use, disabling some features you don’t use and so on. If you have a useful tip or tweak make sure to share it in the comments bellow!

Visual Studio 11

Get Into the Zone

“Visual Studio 11” offers an improved developer experience that includes a simplified user interface designed to keep developers focused on their work, with fewer distractions and easier access to the tools they need.

“We know that developers can lose a lot of their time just orienting themselves to a project and the tools they are working with,” said Jason Zander, corporate vice president, Visual Studio, Microsoft. “By refreshing the user interface, we’ve made much of the core functionality easier for a developer to find and use quickly, helping maintain concentration.”

Reduced toolbar commands: To help free up precious workspace, Microsoft has reduced the number of default commands that show on toolbars in the user interface. These commands can still be accessed through the drop-down menus or added back onto the toolbar if the user wants them, but now the default work area is significantly larger. For example, the cut, copy and paste toolbar commands were removed because research has shown that most developers use the keyboard shortcuts instead.

Simplified graphics: Visual Studio 11 eliminates the use of color within tools except in cases where color is used for notification or status change purposes. Now, the user interface competes far less with the developer’s content. Other user interface graphics, such as line work and iconography, also have been simplified to be less distracting.

Comprehensive search: Visual Studio 11 features a comprehensive search capability, allowing developers to quickly find what they are looking for within commands and configuration options, tool windows, and open files.

Workflow hubs: New workflow hubs combine common tasks into one simplified window. Rather than force developers to interact with two or more tool windows to get tasks done, Visual Studio 11 streamlines common tasks so that many can be accomplished from within a single window.

Preview Tabs: Developers can view the contents of documents using new Preview Tabs, which get reused as the developer works. As a result, developers no longer end up with large numbers of extraneous documents open as a byproduct of common tasks such as debugging or browsing results.

In addition, “Visual Studio 11″ Beta also includes support for Windows 8 and Web development, which are supported by Visual Studio Express for Windows 8 and “Visual Studio 11″ Express for Web, respectively.

.NET Framework 4.5 Beta

With .NET Framework 4.5, Microsoft .NET has been enhanced significantly to enable developers to be as productive as possible while building rich, reliable and high-performance software in managed code.

Following are some major improvements in .NET Framework 4.5:

Languages: To help developers deliver responsive clients and scalable servers, the C# and Visual Basic languages now have built-in support for writing asynchronous code almost as easily as if it were synchronous. And to help developers tackle data-complex problems, F# integrates Type Providers to make data access trivial in F# programs and components.

Performance: The Common Language Runtime has been overhauled to provide better performance, in particular for server applications and services. With additions such as background server garbage collection, multicore background JIT compilation and profile-guided optimization, managed applications can now start faster and run with better throughput and lower latency.

Networking: With the proliferation of devices and continuous services in the cloud, .NET Framework 4.5 builds upon the high-quality networking libraries already available in .NET to further enable the development of increasingly connected applications. New support spans from modern HTTP libraries to WebSockets to support for contract-first service development.

Beyond such areas, many additions have gone into improving the .NET Framework end to end. There are improvements from regular expression processing to better support for compression standards, enhanced support for HTML5, developer productivity enhancements in Entity Framework, optimized mobile experiences through ASP.NET, and more, ensuring .NET Framework 4.5 has something new for all developers building for the client and the cloud.

Download it now!

You can download both Visual Studio 11 Beta and .NET Framework 4.5 using the link bellow.

What’s new?

Swipe, slide, and zoom

Touch a full-powered PC. It’s fast and it’s fluid. Take natural, direct, hands-on control.

Apps, front and center

Apps in Windows 8 work together to get things done faster. Get them from the Windows Store.

Your Windows, everywhere

Windows 8 can connect you to your files, photos, people, and settings, wherever you sign in.

Wall-to-wall web

Internet Explorer 10 Consumer Preview brings you immersive web browsing on screens big and small.

The familiar, made better

Still devoted to your mouse and keyboard? Windows 8 makes the tried-and-true feel brand new.

System requirements:

• Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64)
• RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) (32-bit) or 2 GB (64-bit)
• HDD: 16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver
• Taking advantage of touch input requires a screen that supports multi-touch
• To run Metro style Apps, you need a screen resolution of 1024 X 768 or greater
• To snap apps, you need a screen resolution of at least 1366 x 768

Download it now!

Download Windows 8 Consumer Preview

Download Windows 8 Consumer Preview .ISO images

The first download link contains Windows 8 Consumer Preview Setup which includes an all in one download. Second link contains download links for all available editions of Windows 8 Consumer Preview in .ISO image format. The Consumer Preview of Windows 8 will expire on January 15th, 2013.

The Setup will check your computer for compatibility and inform you if there is anything that needs to be changed. You can also upgrade to Windows 8 Consumer Preview from Windows 7, Vista or XP.

1. Moving your wp-config.php file

This is one of WordPress’s best features without a doubt, but not known to many people. WordPress can look for it’s wp-config.php file in a directory one level above your public_htm or a subfolder, basically that means that you can move your wp-config.php file in your home directory which will double your security level since wp-config.php is the most important file of your whole WordPress installation. If someone gets it it’s basically game over, so make sure to move it right away, the best way is to use FTP client provided in your cPanel.

2. Force SSL (Encrypted connection) on your Dashboard

If you want all transfered data to be secured while you are administrating the site make sure to force SSL, but also first make sure to check if your hosting provider supports that. If you are on HostGator or Wp WebHost you are good to go. It’s quite simple just add this line of code to your wp-config.php file:

define(‘FORCE_SSL_ADMIN’, true);

3. Protect yourself form Script Injections

The lines of code below will protect your blog from Script Injections when added to your .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} (<|%3C).*script.*(>|%3E) [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} GLOBALS(=|[|%[0-9A-Z]{0,2}) [OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} _REQUEST(=|[|%[0-9A-Z]{0,2})
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php [F,L]

4. Protect important files

WordPress’s most important files are a key to your website’s functioning and represent a core of the whole platform, that’s why you need to protect them. As you can notice you can protect you wp-config.php file by moving it one level up, other files sadly don’t have that option, which is why you need to add the following lines of code to your .htaccess file in order to protect them:

<files .htaccess>
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</files>
<files readme.html>
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</files>
<files install.php>
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</files>
<files wp-config.php>
Order allow,deny
Deny from all
</files>

5. Remove WordPress version number info

If you have an old version of WordPress(which I strongly don’t recommend) you should at least hide the version number, if on the other hand you run the latest version do so as well! It reveals a very important information to the potential attacker who can use it to go through some know bugs in that version. In order to remove it just add this line of code to functions.php file:

remove_action(‘wp_head’, ‘wp_generator’);

6. Change or delete default admin user

When you install WordPress you get a username admin by default. If someone tries brute force method the first try will be with “admin” in the username field, so make sure to either delete it and use a new account on rename it by going to Users > All Users.

7. Use a strong password

This is something logical and I think that you already know that passwords like: password, 123456, administrator, or similar are nowhere close to strong! If you want a secure blog you need a strong and hard to crack password like: “s9*&(T)H)(S8uyh s    U&*@!HPSu7 8u0-as”, as you can see I used spaces, both small and capital letters, numbers, special characters and created almost impossible to crack password, if you want you can’s come up with anything you can use a service like Free Password Generator. If you have trouble remembering all your passwords I recommend LastPass.

In Summary, there is a lot that can be done in this field, implementing everything written above will make you WordPress installation harder to crack, but you can never be one hundred percent secure. Although I can recommend some awesome security plugins like: Better WP Security and Secure WordPress which is a plugin by Website Defender which is another service I strongly recommend.

Ok, now when you know how the process works you are able to install plugins, this is my list of most useful WordPress plugins which I use on every WordPress installation.

1. Akismet – Anti Spam Protection Plugin

This plugin is available by default in every WordPress installation, but if you deleted it you made a mistake. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. In order to make it work you need to get your Akismet key, which is free.

2. Contact Form 7 – An easy to use contact form

This plugin is definitely a must have for every blogger. It will allow you to make secure contact forms with just a few clicks and ease. Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

3. WordPress SEO by Yoast or All in One SEO Pack – SEO

One of these plugins is inevitable if you want your site to do well in Search Engine world. Since Search Engines are one of the best traffic generators I can say that if you don’ have one now, download it this same instant. Personally, I like Yoast’s plugin more since it gives way more control to the user and has some advanced savvy features. On the other hand, All in One SEO Pack is more popular and easier to use. All in all, you can try both and then decide.

4. WP Super Cache – A very fast caching engine for WordPress

If you want a faster website, WP Super Cache is first in the line.  This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.The static html files will be served to the vast majority of your users, but because a user’s details are displayed in the comment form after they leave a comment those requests are handled by the legacy caching engine.

5. WPtouch – Easy to use Mobile Plugin

Since mobile devices are getting more popular every second, you should make your website mobile-compatible. There is no better way than WPtouch. This Plugin automatically transforms your WordPress website into an application-like theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects when viewed from the most popular mobile web browsing devices like the iPhone, iPod touch, Android mobile devices, Palm Pre/Pixi and BlackBerry OS6 mobile devices. The admin panel allows you to customize many aspects of its appearance, and deliver a fast, user-friendly and stylish version of your site to touch mobile visitors, without modifying a single bit of code (or affecting) your regular desktop theme.

6. Google XML Sitemaps – Another SEO goodie

This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.

7. WP-PageNavi – Page Navigation taken to the next level

Did you ever find ← Older posts | Newer posts → kinda bad? Well, I did, and another three million people who downloaded this plugin.

8. Jetpack by WordPress.com – Get features from WordPress.com

Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com including real time stats, spell-check, sharing buttons and much more.

9. WP Security Scan – Scans installation for security vulnerabilities

WP Security Scan checks your WordPress website/blog for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions such as:

1. Passwords
2. File permissions
3. Database security
4. Version hiding
5. WordPress admin protection/security
6. Removes WP Generator META tag from core code

10. Broken Link Checker – This plugin will check your blog for broken links

This plugin will monitor your blog looking for broken links and let you know if any are found.

This is the end of my list. I found these plugins very useful and use them on regular basis. Do you think that I missed something? Share it in the comments below.