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  Fujitsu CTO: Flash is just a stopgap

Flash is a necessary waystation as we travel to a single in-memory storage architecture. That's the view from a Fujitsu chief technology officer's office. Dr Joseph Reger, CTO at Fujitsu Technology Solutions, is that office-holder, and – according to him – flash is beset with problems that will become unsolvable. He says we are seeing increases in flash density at the expense of our ability to read and write data. Each shrink in process geometry, from 3X to 2X and onto 1X, ...

   Flash,Memory,Bottleneck,Limitation,Futur     2011-08-12 07:31:34

  The Death of .NET and the Power of Perception

One of my long-standing issues with Microsoft is its inability to control the perceptions surrounding its own products. One of the biggest examples was during the Windows Vista years when, even after the product had been fully patched and worked fine, Apple continued to do a better job to define the image of Windows (compilation of ads here) than Microsoft did, costing Microsoft billions in lost revenue for the millions it saved on a strong advertising campaign. The firm has a history of being p...

   .NET,future,death,bottleneck,development     2011-08-10 03:13:40

  How big are PHP arrays (and values) really? (Hint: BIG!)

Upfront I want to thank Johannes and Tyrael for their help in finding some of the more hidden memory usage. In this post I want to investigate the memory usage of PHP arrays (and values in general) using the following script as an example, which creates 100000 unique integer array elements and measures the resulting memory usage: <?php $startMemory = memory_get_usage(); $array = range(1, 100000); echo memory_get_usage() - $startMemory, ' bytes'; How much would you expect it to ...

   PHP,Array,Memory occupation,Garbage collection     2011-12-16 10:06:04

  PHP sucks (but, some frameworks don't)

I started web development with PHP, and I've decided I've had enough. Why? Keep reading.PHP (the language) sucks. There, I said it. 1029380128301928301823 GlobalsObject system hacked onC extension system sucksDocumentation sucks (read more; no, I'm not drunk)Has a terrible communityAll in all, designed by total idiots. You've probably heard this a ton of times before, but, here it is again. THERE ARE JUST WAY TOO MANY GLOBALS. Why in the world does md5() need to be global? Do you serio...

   PHP,Sucks,Framework,Good,Bad Design     2011-11-20 07:08:16

  Diving Deeper into HTML5 Offline Browsing

Recently, I published an article on one of the new features in HTML 5 called Offline Browsing  in HTML5 with ApplicationCache.The response to that article was good, and I was asked to expand on some further points including:how to decide on what files to cachethe implications of caching those filesdebugging the ApplicationCacheSo, that’s where this article will start: where the last one finished.  If you haven’t, you should probably read the previous article before this o...

   HTML5,Offline browsing,New breakthrough,Feature     2011-12-20 08:46:06

  On Programming Deadlines

There are a lot of differences between programming, and programming professionally. The most notorious of which, is deadlines.DeadlinesWhen you're writing code for yourself, you can spend as much (or as little time) on it as you please--but when you're writing code for other people, you've got only a limited amount of time and resources to get the job done. In my experience, this typically leads to one of two situations:You've got to extend the deadline to finish the job properly.You've got to w...

   Programming,Deadline,Transparent,Test,TODO     2011-11-01 07:10:21

  Cross Browser HTML5 Drag and Drop

HTML5 Drag and Drop has been talked about a lot lately, but it’s hard to find really useful information about implementing it across multiple browsers.Mozilla, Apple and Microsoft all have pages describing how to use it, but their examples seem to work only in their particular browser (Apple’s example doesn’t even work in their own! Updated, Jan. 11, 2009: Although I have not been able to get this example working on Safari 2.0.4 and 3....

   HTML5,Drag and drop, Demo,Source code,Cr     2011-09-20 13:42:45

  The Evolution of a Programmer

High School/Jr.High 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD" 20 END First year in College program Hello(input, output) begin writeln('Hello World') end. Senior year in College (defun hello (print (cons 'Hello (list 'World)))) New professional #include <stdio.h> void main(void) { char *message[] = {"Hello ", "World"}; int i; for(i = 0; i < 2; ++i) printf("%s", message[i]); printf("\n"); } Seasoned professional #include <iostream....

   Humour,Evolution,Programmer     2012-04-23 06:30:33

  Automate Everything

Performing manual, repetitive tasks enrages me. I used to think this was a corollary of being a programmer, but I’ve come to suspect (or hope) that this behaviour is inherent in being human. But being able to hack together scripts simply makes it much easier to go from a state of rage to a basic solution in a very small amount of time. As a side point, this is one of the reasons that teaching the basics of programming in schools is so important. It’s hard to think of any j...

   Automate,Email,Repeative     2012-02-07 06:21:19

  Circumventing browser connection limits for fun and profit

A few days ago, this video hosted by metacafe popped up on digg, explaining how to increase site download times by tweaking your browser settings to increase connection parallelism. To explain why this works, let’s step back a bit to discuss how browsers manage server connections. In building any application, developers are often required to make ‘utilitarian’ choices. Pretentiously paraphrasing Jeremy Bentham, ‘utilitarian’ describes an approach that ââ‚...

   HTTP,Concurrent connection limit,Solution,AJAX     2011-12-14 13:01:02

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