kmod's blog

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

I remarked today to someone that a PS3 is “worth more than I’d pay for it”.  (Specifically, receiving a PS3 as a gift is worth more than I’d pay for it.)  What I really meant to say is “worth more than the maximum I’d pay for it”.  So the question is, is that true, and…

I read (part of) an interesting paper today out of UCSD.  The main premise of the paper is that “the rate at which we can switch transistors is far outpacing our ability to dissipate the heat created by those transistors.”  The rest of paper is then devoted to describing a system they have of determining…

One of the reasons that I haven’t switched my main browser to Chrome is the lack of extensions.  Chrome has been great for running JS-intensive web apps, but for everyday stuff it just can’t keep up with all the functionality that Firefox gains from having extensions.  This is actually the main reason I haven’t switched;…

I attended a talk today from some of the developers on the GNOME Shell project.  I have to say, the stuff they’re doing is pretty visually impressive.  They seemed to have some pretty solid design ideas from a UX perspective.  And watching how easy it was to add extensions was really cool. Basically, they have…

There’s a new dimension that I’ve started judging computer tools and software on: how much control I have over what it does.  There aren’t many things more frustrating than a program that you’re trying to use, that you know it should be able to do the right thing, but you can’t convince it to do…