For Tim Bray’s Wide Finder, what you need is something that will lift data off the disk at the maximum possible rate, and distribute the processing across as many CPUs as needed. The end-to-end result cannot be generated faster than the data can be read from disk. The first part of the problem is to [...]
[Replaced initial section with an update for feed-reader results] Guess I want to hit this part once more, before leaving it alone. All the solutions that depend on “parallel I/O” can only yield fast results when the file is already in memory. The are some (few) scenarios where you can expect the file contents to [...]
Visiting my father in Colorado and – as usual – resolving any problems his computers have developed since my last visit. For context, my father is an engineer, spent most of his career in aerospace, defense electronics, more recently chip design from modems (2400 baud through 56K) and more recently cell phone chip sets. Not [...]
This is a big deal. Digging information out of government sites, I have found, is often obscure and difficult. A framework for making information easily accessible can be both of general benefit, and help oversight on government activities. Sitemap Protocol | Sunlight Foundation Google has been working with federal agencies to help them ensure that [...]
Back in the 1980′s, the menubar was brilliant. Applications loaded off floppy disk had to be small. Small applications could not have too many functions. Functions could be completely enumerated in the menubar. Browsing through the menubar pull-down menus could pretty much tell you everything the program could do. On-line help was limited or non-existent [...]
Have to love Matisse – the GUI composer in Netbeans – and there are many other interesting features, but I find too many sequences like the following when using Netbeans: click, drag or type … !@#$%?? (go back) click … ?!? … (hold mouse still over object) press mouse button down (wait) release button … [...]
I Want My iTV “We know that Apple has destroyed the music business, in terms of pricing, and if we don’t take control they’ll do the same thing on the video side,” NBC Universal (GE ) chief Jeff Zucker told an audience at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications on Oct. 29. Nonsense. [...]
[wrap up - added later] I must be getting cranky in my old age. The discussion around Tim Bray’s “Wide Finder” bugs me. ongoing · The Wide Finder Project In my Finding Things chapter of Beautiful Code, the first complete program is a little Ruby script that reads the ongoing Apache logfile and figures out [...]