http://www.jelovic.com/weblog Speak softly and carry a big laptop Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:22:46 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Russ Cox has a pretty good post about UTF-8. I basically knew the rough concepts but didn’t know that it can be treated as ASCII for many transformations, so that stuff like splitting text into lines, etc., can be done really fast. http://www.jelovic.com/weblog/?p=257 I’m not an expert about DNS, but I learned a few things over the years by talking to people like Spider, and have noticed that there are a lot of misconceptions among programmers. Here’s a quick brain dump: DNS is distributed and fault-tolerant. It’s not very ... http://www.jelovic.com/weblog/?p=255 I like my SSH clients to be console applications, not GUI programs, so that I can script them easily. I’ve been using OpenSSH for Windows for a while now, and while it works, it has one major problem: its support for public key authentication is broken on Vista+. (Don’t ask.) ... http://www.jelovic.com/weblog/?p=253 Awesome post from Mike Rundle about how to design visual elements for your programs. I like the fact that he breaks things down so that even esthetically-challenged programmers like me can replicate these visual tricks. http://www.jelovic.com/weblog/?p=252 Beating a dead horse here, but here’s another text about about the woes of data structures done in a language without value types. If I were Sun I’d swallow my pride and start copying features from other languages and runtimes. They have an absolutely awesome JIT compiler and a very ... http://www.jelovic.com/weblog/?p=251 Irradiated Software has implemented Aero Snap from Windows 7 on a Mac. I believe this is the first time I’ve seen somebody copy a Windows UI element on a Mac. If people on the Windows team are looking for confirmation that they’ve done an awesome job, this is it. http://www.jelovic.com/weblog/?p=250 Many years ago I wrote Why Java Will Always Be Slower than C++. As any article that says something “bad” about somebody’s favorite programming language, this one was controversial, resulting in a torrent of email spit being sent my way. The problem mostly boils down to the Java bytecode ... http://www.jelovic.com/weblog/?p=249 I provided some seed capital for TickTail, so it was awesome to see it launch yesterday. For those of you interested in financial markets, TickTail provides free real-time data from the Belgrade Exchange. Unlike the exchanges in the developed world, Belex is fairly thinly traded. Nevertheless it does ... http://www.jelovic.com/weblog/?p=248 Pretty good article. Loads of references. http://www.jelovic.com/weblog/?p=247 Today we’ll talk about a super-awesome feature of F# called Discriminated Unions. From time to time you want to put N types under a single cap. The standard way to do this in object-oriented languages to is to create a common interface and then implement that interface in a ... http://www.jelovic.com/weblog/?p=246