Archive: 2009-01
Superfluous warning
I saw a poster in a coffee shop, obviously written by an adept of the ‘Nuts. Warning: contains nuts’ school of posterior defence. It advertised a new drink:
No fingers, no freedom
Take good care of your fingertips. You won’t be going anywhere without them.
As promised: detenc, a fast character encoding detector
I wrote about my discoveries with false optimisation yesterday in the context of a fast, low-memory character encoding detector I’d written. I promised to release the code soon, and I’ve now done so.
Don’t bother buffering
I started out programming on 8- and 16-bit computers, and it was hard back then. Uphill both ways in the snow and all that. My first steps in C were taken on a 16-bit platform, in which using more than 64 KiB in a program required serious attention. I don’t have much cause to write in C these days, but when I do, I’m pleasantly surprised by how much easier it seems. Partly, that’s due to memory availability and bus width having outstripped the requirements of most tasks, but much of it is helped by the huge improvements in operating systems—at least, on the operating systems that I’m using—over the past few decades. However, I sometimes forget just how much is being done for me in the background.