I read a good article highlighting why it is difficult to write a decent multi-threaded app that scales well with the number of hardware cores and wanted to share it with you all.
http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2012/08/what-makes-parallel-programming-hard.html
Speed optimizations can even cause unintended artificial limitations. Something to think about.
A friend of mine recently shared a link with me that was quite moving about 9/11 that I had not heard before. The short, 12 min video was produced by Tom Hanks.
Orig Vid Link: http://biggeekdad.com/2011/09/boatlift/
Boatlift is the epic story of the 9/11 boatlift that evacuated half a million people from the stricken piers and seawalls of Lower Manhattan. I had no idea that the 9/11 boat evacuation was larger than Dunkirk and they completed it so fast. The video is narrated by Tom Hanks who I am a big fan of as usually whatever he has a hand in turns out to be a great production. If you’ve never seen Band of Brothers set aside a couple weekend nights and watch one of Tom Hanks finer productions.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDOrzF7B2Kg[/youtube]
I recently learned the hard way that refactoring your old code to be more consistent with how you write code now as opposed to how you wrote it a year ago can be dangerous. Things like class names may seem like a completely internal mechanism and is in most cases, but the rule for that changes the moment you place one into the AndroidManifest.xml. Continue reading
Filenames. Those magical labels we give our documents, our pictures, or other various creations. All filenames consist of two parts: Name.Extension where the Name part is the visible on all computer systems and the .Extension part is sometimes hidden from view. I personally hate computer systems that hide the extension because it allows phishing scammers an easy means to infect a computer by asking the victim to open up a picture called “aVirusPicture.jpg” and people will do so since they know .jpg is just a picture extension… not realizing that the full filename is “aVirusPicture.jpg.exe” because the Operating System has hidden the last “.exe” on them. Continue reading