XML, To Suck or Not to Suck?

03/28/2003 -/- 1:40pm -\- posted by: joecamel

A While back Slashdot Posted an article entitled XML Is To Hard for Programmers detailing the reasons that XML is not being as widely adopted by the developer community as it was initially hoped to be. Today however, Tim Bray, an XML Co-Founder has released a rebutle entitled Why XML Doesn't Suck which states the exact opposite. Its a great read for those of you that either currently developing software and utilizing XML in your toolbox, or for you Developers that are contemplating adding XML to your list of technologies that you use to develop your solutions. As we all know, XML is one of the most common "Buzzwords" thrown around today, and is creatng lots of interest amongst the community, making developers make the decision of whether or not to take their valuable time learning it, or to stay away from it and to focus therir efforts elswwhere. By compayring these two articles, it may help clarify to those of you in this predicament which would be the right way to go for you as an individual.

Ransom Software Distribution, the New Way?

03/27/2003 -/- 11:30pm -\- posted by: joecamel

Freshmeat has an article up now about an interesting new way to distribute software for both Independent Software Developers, as well as Software Companies that are trying to market their software in hopes of ultimately turning a profit. Ransom Software is a way to attempt to eventually collect a pre-defined monetary sum to recover development costs, etc. It is quite a complicated explanation, one which I'll leave to the article to detail, but, for anyone interested in regaining some if not all of their development costs when they release their Open Source software, This Article is a must read, and something to seriously consider for future development of Open Source Projects.

Interview with Marc Tremblay, UltraSPARC architec

03/26/2003 -/- 8:33pm -\- posted by: joecamel

An interesting interview with Dr. Marc Tremblay, a distinguished engineer at Sun and the co-architect of the UltraSPARC processor, at Ace's Hardware, talks about a processor he is working on that is claimed to deliver 30 times the performance of current CPUs, utilizing an agressive multi-core/multi-threaded architecture. He talks about upcoming highly multithreaded CPUs from Sun © as well as a wide range of problems facing today's CPU designers, from branch mispredictions to DRAM latency/bandwidth and power dissipation, and the ways in which he is working on solving them. The interview is a good read for SPARC Coders and for anyone interested in upcoming processor technology that may drastically change the playing field and the Processors that our code needs to be optimized for. 30 times faster!!! w00t w00t! I want one! My Dual Ultra60 seems to be getting slower by the day =]

GCC Myths Revealed

03/25/2003 -/- 9:40pm -\- posted by: joecamel

An article posted in Mid February on Freshmeat attempts to reveal to C/C++ coders the false myths that have plagued the GCC community for some time now relating to optimizing code during compilation. A lot of Coders out there have for one reason or another gotten in the habit of using flags in their Makefiles to "optimize" their compiled code in hopes of gaining added runtime effeciency. As the article clearly points out, by citing sections of the GCC manual page, as well as other references, some of the methods currently used by developers in hope of optimizing their code, the methods may in fact decrease effeciency by increasing binary sizes, as well as adding to compile times (amongst other side effects.) Anyone that uses GCC should take a glance at the article if for no other reason than to clarify what methods of optimization should be used and which optimization methods are useless or self-implied by other means of optimizing (compiler flags, coding methods, et al.) You can view the article on Here.

Gnutella 2 Specifications Released!

03/25/2003 -/- 5:22pm -\- posted by: joecamel

Gnutella 2 Specifications Released! Let the Client coding begin! Apparently there was much debate of the new specifications, but, alas they have been set and released. You can view the specifications First Draft Here as well as a Mirror Here

Fundamentals of Multi-Threading

06/18/2001 -/- 2:40pm -\- posted by: joecamel

An absolute must read for any serious coder. This article is written very nicely, illustrated well, and get's to the point. You may have thought you knew the ins, outs and caveats of Multi-Threading, but rest assure, this article at SystemLogic will introduce at least SOME new knowledge into your brain..

Network Application Performance Planning

06/18/2001 -/- 2:36pm -\- posted by: joecamel

SysAdmin Magazine is running an article at the moment comparing Network Application Performance. The article compares RedHat Linux, Solaris x86, FreeBSD 4.2, and Windows 2000. The results are actually quite suprising IMHO. Nice charts. Good Info. A good read for anyone that's into developing Network Apps and also needing to plan the environment(s) that their application will run under. Get a feel for where your bottlenecks will be with whichever platform you target...