Archive for interesting

Rails vs Seaside

September 10, 2007 at 7:36 pm · Filed under interesting, languages, programming

I came across an interesting post about SmallTalk’s Seaside versus Ruby’s Rails.

The meat is in the comments which are very polite and informative. I’ve only played with Squeak once back in college so I didn’t really grasp the whole editing-live-objects-which-don’t-live-in-files thing.

It sounds pretty neat and pretty powerful.

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The Power of Binary Searching

August 21, 2007 at 7:41 am · Filed under interesting, programming

I always knew that binary searching was fast, O(log2) and all that. But when you have to run it by hand over 3000 subversion revisions, looking for the place where you introduced a memory leak, and after four steps you’ve eliminated 93% of the search space, you get a new appreciation for it.

There are some tools out there for automating these searches through subversion. They didn’t fit our problem though because determining whether we were showing a memory leak was fuzzy.

Turned out to be 4 memory leaks. Two very minor ones, and two major ones in third party libraries, one of which only showed up on the Mac platform.

Thanks to binary searching, we could quickly identify the exact spots where these leaks were introduced.

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Bjorne Stroustrup lecture

August 9, 2007 at 4:15 pm · Filed under ideas, interesting, programming

I saw Bjorne Stroustrup give a lecture as part of the New York City Google TechTalks. Pretty interesting stuff. More updates to the language that I was expecting. Some much desired features too.

Two downsides:

  1. the language is going to be that much more complicated. I’m looking at you, seperate meta-type system for controlling templates
  2. it took so long for the STL and templates to get good enough support, I doubt I’ll see any of this until 2015

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