Archive for August, 2007

Understanding Performance Trade-offs

Thursday, August 30th, 2007

I think most programmers these days are fairly aware of the performance trade-offs of using an interpreted or bytecode-based language like Perl or Java, compared to a compiled language such as C or C++.
There is also little doubt that we now have more computing power available on the desktop than ever before. The performance losses […]

Stealing Focus

Thursday, August 30th, 2007

Applications are sometimes slow. In fact, the longer you use an application, the slower it becomes. Or rather, the application stays the same, and you get faster at using it, so it seems slower than it used to.
Perhaps you no longer wait for slow web pages to load, and instead you load them in a […]

New camera

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

A while back, I wrote that I was considering a digital SLR camera. As it turns out, my wife surprised me for my birthday with a Canon Digital Rebel XT!
This camera is great. The shutter speed is incredible compared to the snapshot cameras I am used to. I can take pictures of our dog running […]