What will programming in Objective-C mean to the C++ programmerDifferent Object Oriented LanguagesAlmost all of us have heard the term object oriented programming, and most of us have used C++. How will Apple's purchase of NeXT, and NeXT's framework using Objective-C affect us as we develop software? If we know C++ already, how hard will it be to get up to speed on Objective-C? Many people will agree that once they understand the concepts of object oriented programming it doesn't matter which language they use. To a degree this is true, but development is easier if the programmer adopts a prog...

In less than one minute, it's now possible to build the Linux kernel from source on a desktop.Besides finishing up the Phoronix Test Suite 3.6-Arendal release this weekend, on Saturday I began running some new Intel CPU benchmarks. In building the Linux 3.1 kernel for x86_64 in a default configuration (make defconfig), I've now managed to trim down the compile time to less than sixty seconds on a single-socket desktop system. Similar speeds can be achieved out of multi-socket servers and other configurations, but this is the first time I'm seeing such kernel build speeds out of a single proces...

The company I work for has a lot of legacy Ruby code, and as Ruby has become kind of a mainstream language, I decided to get a book about it and learn how it works. As my learning resource, I chose The Ruby Programming language by David Flanagan and Yukihiro Matsumoto as that receives great customer reviews, covers Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9 and is authoritative because the language creator is one of the authors. The book makes a good read in general. There are plenty of code examples, but not too much to obscure the prose. What I found first interesting, later annoyi...

I believe that unless your application meets one of these native application criteria, you should not create a native application, but should instead focus on building a mobile web application. Like I said before, I’m a big fan of native applications and I feel that there are a lot of great innovative and market opportunities here, but mobile web apps are the only long-term viable platform for mobile content, services, and applications.Native applications don’t service the user better in any significant way; they only add cost to your project, decrease your distribution channels,...

I’ve been on a web tweaking kick lately: how to speed up your javascript, gzip files with your server, and now how to set up caching. But the reason is simple: site performance is a feature.For web sites, speed may be feature #1. Users hate waiting, we get frustrated by buffering videos and pages that pop together as images slowly load. It’s a jarring (aka bad) user experience. Time invested in site optimization is well worth it, so let’s dive in.What is Caching?Caching is a great example of the ubiquitous time-space tradeoff in programming. You can save time by using sp...

There is a huge bug when Group Messaging is disabled in iOS 5. I'm shocked Apple hasn't fixed this yet.Today a friend sent out a text message blast, announcing they got a new phone number. Shortly after, I got text messages from three random people I don't know. I was confused how these people got my number, but then I realized they were replies intended for my friend who sent out the text blast.If you've ever used the Group Messaging feature, it's supposed to thread messages sent to groups, showing the person's name above their reply. But in order to use this...

Although I’ve played around with Scala for the few months, these efforts largely involved simple scripts and casual reading. It wasn’t until last month that the opportunity to use Scala in a large scale project finally arose and I dove right in. The project was a typical REST based web service built on top of Amazon’s Elastic Beanstalk, SimpleDB, S3 and Redis*. First off let’s talk about why I chose Scala in the first place. After spending a good deal of my last year entrenched in JavaScript and appreciating its functional nature, brevity and flexibility, writing Ja...

Introduction      Kernighan and Plauger'sThe Elements of Programming Stylewas an important and rightly influential book.  Butsometimes I feel its concise rules were taken as a cookbookapproach to good style instead of the succinct expression ofa philosophy they were meant to be.  If the book claims thatvariable names should be chosen meaningfully, doesn't itthen follow that variables whose names are small essays ontheir use are even better?  Isn't MaximumValueUntilOverflow a better name than maxval?  I don't think so.      What follows is a set...