2009.04.30
Best Day to Blog
Most of us don't have enough time to blog every day. Given that blogging ideas can often be pending for days, which is the best day to publish them?
Continue reading "Best Day to Blog"2009.04.26
Dual-Use Technology
Lego sells lovely toys with a great educational potential. No peace-loving father would have a problem giving them as a gift (especially, if he can also occasionally take part in the action). Unfortunately, children seem to have their own (genetically preprogrammed?) ideas of what is interesting to build. I still love Lego, but I'm a bit worried about human nature.
Continue reading "Dual-Use Technology"2009.04.20
A Tiling Demo
Over the past (too many) days I've been preparing my presentation for the ACCU 2009 conference. At one point I wanted to show how loop tiling increases locality of reference and therefore cache hits. Surprisingly, I could not find a demo on the web, so I built one from scratch. Here are two applets demonstrating memory accesses during a matrix raise to the power of two operation.
Continue reading "A Tiling Demo"2009.04.15
Drawing Tools
1 Word = 1 Millipicture
— /usr/games/fortune
It’s no accident that in all engineering branches, our colleagues often communicate using drawings and diagrams. Given many artifacts’ scale and complexity, a drawing is often the best way to describe them. Uniquely, in software development we can easily derive pictures from code, and sometimes even code from pictures.
Continue reading "Drawing Tools"2009.04.08
Precision in Comments
As I was writing some code for the CScout refactoring browser today, I reflected on the importance of writing precise and clear comments.
Continue reading "Precision in Comments"2009.04.01
Open Source Opens up for Business
Today, as I was reading the sourceforge.net monthly update, I was impressed by the number of business-related software in the top-25 project list. I was sure this wasn't always the case, so I dug up the corresponding the top-25 projects at the beginning of 2006 to refresh my memory. The differences are profound.
Continue reading "Open Source Opens up for Business"
