Tag Archives: Tech

Latency

Posted on 2014-04-11 by jcs

Every programmer understands, at least in a general way, the relative latency of various computer operations. For example, we all know that accessing a value from a CPU register is faster than accessing that value from an L1 cache is … Continue reading →

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CSS By Example

Posted on 2014-03-29 by jcs

Via Jean-Philippe Paradis, I came across this CSS tutorial by Xah Lee. It’s nice because the page shows several examples of CSS effects. When you click on an effect, it takes you to a short tutorial that discusses the effect … Continue reading →

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How is this Legal?

Posted on 2014-01-21 by jcs

I’m in favor of stopping botnets and all but remotely deleting old copies of Tor from users’ machines? I don’t see how Microsoft avoids law suits and criminal complaints. They doubtless have some obscure terms-of-service item covering this but if … Continue reading →

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When Your git Server Dies

Posted on 2014-01-11 by jcs

I’ve written before about how I use git to keep my two main machines in sync. The other day the linux server that I kept the repositories on died. I had turned it off for a few seconds to deal … Continue reading →

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The Five Word Tech Horrors Meme

Posted on 2013-12-19 by jcs

Via Jean-Philippe Paradis, I was led to the Twitter meme/thread/hashtag #FiveWordTechHorrors. The idea is identify an especially egregious tech issue in five words. Some of my favorites: It’s a standard, like Windows We emailed you your password Congress is drafting … Continue reading →

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The Miracle of UTF-8

Posted on 2013-09-30 by jcs

I’ve written about UTF-8 before and recounted the story of its invention one night over dinner by Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. Now Tom Scott over at audible.com has a wonderful video on UTF-8, which he calls the world’s greatest … Continue reading →

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PostScript And PDF

Posted on 2011-10-02 by jcs

I’ve read several times that PDF is “just compressed PostScript” but I recently learned that that’s not true. David Evans has a nice article over at Adobe on PostScript vs. PDF. Evans starts off by describing what PostScript is and … Continue reading →

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Power Update

Posted on 2011-09-29 by jcs

Two weeks ago I wrote about power management in electronic devices. The thrust of that post was that because battery technology hasn’t advanced very much it was necessary to work on the problem at the other end by making our … Continue reading →

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And You Thought We Weren’t Making Any Progress

Posted on 2011-09-15 by jcs

I came across two articles today—one looking backward, one looking forward—that illustrate the incredible progress we’re making in power management and battery life for our electronic devices. This is important because battery technology isn’t making tremendous strides (although there have … Continue reading →

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