Archive for 2007/6
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The Fastest Month Parser in the West
-- June 27, 2007, 10:14 p.m.
I was trying to remove bottlenecks in my logmerge program when I noticed it was spending more time than I thought it should trying to parse months. Going back to my fast and easy token classification in C post, I figured maybe it'd be a good idea to not have my algorithm be O(n) (where n == 12). The first ...
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But the Water Has Already Fallen
-- June 27, 2007, 1:30 p.m.
I think the thing I like most about writing software is that it's never done. There are varying levels of completion, sure, but there's always more you can do. I like to write code assuming I'm wrong. I unit test because I assume I've made mistakes or will in the future, but I assume whatever concepts I'm laying down are ...
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Sipping from the Waterfall
-- June 25, 2007, 5:27 p.m.
I had a conversation with someone from another group today. I guess he's a contractor or something with a very small and specific task he's trying to perform. He probably has a hard job or something, but this was ridiculous. The following is a description of what went on in my abbreviated and paraphrased quoting style: Guy in my group: ...
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Please Wake Me From My Hibernation
-- June 22, 2007, 4:10 p.m.
When we started my current project, we had a few different ideas about how persistence would work. I'm not ashamed to admit that I was not in favor of hibernate, and that was mostly because it was big, complicated magic I didn't understand. I was assured that the persistence layer wasn't going to be my responsibility, and the guy pushing ...
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Empty Catch Blocks are Always Wrong
-- June 15, 2007, 4:31 p.m.
I like to read code. It has some terrible consequences, though. It seems that every time I get comfortable with a third-party API (or even java standard APIs) and I got to read the source, I find some terrible bugs. I realize this sounds exactly like java exception anti-patterns. I didn't really start out with that goal, but today I ...
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Java Exception Antipatterns
-- June 9, 2007, 10:28 p.m.
I just read Tim McCune's post Exception Handling Antipatterns. IMO, he missed the biggest one: Checked exceptions. The whole concept of patterns is a generalization of what most of us do anyway, which is to look for commonalities in design and implementations and try to figure out what things work and what things didn't. To summarize the post, let me ...
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The Deputy C Compiler
-- June 8, 2007, 12:45 a.m.
websplat is a simple http load tester based on libevent that I wrote a really long time ago. I was using it for some testing today, and I'd occasionally get a warning that suggested I may have overstepped a boundary. I couldn't reproduce it under valgrind (which was under different circumstances on a different machine, but I was hopeful), so ...