Category: Uncategorized
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Troubles of using GNU Make
There seem to be lots of posts these days about people “discovering” how using build process automation can be a good thing. I’ve always felt like the proliferation of new build tools is largely a result of peoples’ excitement at discovering something new; I’ve always used GNU Make and have always loved it. As I…
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Understanding Richard Stallman
I’ve never really understood Richard Stallman and what he fights for, but with this recent email of his to the gcc list (on a thread about the impact of the GPL vs the BSD licenses on the gcc vs clang projects, which is worth a read), I think I have a better idea. It starts very…
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New toy: USB microscope
As I’ve moved to smaller and smaller parts, I’ve spent more and more time inspecting small details of my boards. I’ve bought a couple things that I use for this purpose: a simple 10x loupe, a maybe 2-3x magnifying glass that I took from a helping-hands thingamajig that I don’t use, and this magnification visor.…
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Brookstone’s “Bluetooth-Enabled Smart Fork”
Can’t make this up: The smart fork that coaches you into healthier eating habits. The HAPIfork is the world’s first smart fork. It’s an electronic fork that lights up and vibrates when you are eating too fast. As it takes 15-20 minutes to feel satisfied, by simply slowing down your pace while eating, you will…
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Treasuries are a Giffen good
A Giffen good is something that people buy more of as prices increase, seemingly working against standard supply-demand theories. They’re different from luxury goods, which have similar behavior; luxury goods are assumed to become more desirable as they become more expensive, since they are more status-providing. A Giffen good, however, is purchased more because as…
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Credit card gift cards
I’m not sure why, but lately I’ve been seeing a lot of prepaid credit cards being advertised as gift cards. And why not — it’s like giving a gift card but without constraining where you can spend it. It’s great for the credit card companies, since they make money, and good for the gift giver…
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Brawny vs wimpy cores
Interesting writeup in favor of brawny cores, by Urs Hölze: Click to access 36448.pdf Seems like the big argument is that many operations are latency-oriented, rather than throughput-oriented. This is clearly true for web processing when a user is waiting for a result, but he makes the point that throughput-oriented batch processing is latency-sensitive,…
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Chrome defaults: Windows vs Linux
I have a list of tabs that I open every day, which I store in a folder in Chrome. Recently the size of this folder passed some threshold, and now Chrome asks me if I’m sure I want to open so many tabs at once. Interestingly, the default choice on Windows is “Yes”, whereas the…
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Email reminder services
I’m a big fan of email reminder services, since my email inbox is the only thing that I reliably check on a regular basis. It’s extremely convenient for me if I can set up something to ping me via email to remind me when I need to do something. So I’ve used a couple services…
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Google Native Client
I saw this interesting blog post today about where the Native Client (NaCl) team is going. I thought the idea was really intriguing: you compile your code once to LVM bitcode, and then each browser has a JIT’er that will turn that into fast native code. It seems like a possible natural progression from sending scripts…
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