BBC Micro TrueType font

I’ve just used the excellent fontstruct to create a clone of the BBC Micro 8 x 8 bitmapped font:

(edit, deleted fontstruct embed which was breaking FireFox)

So now all you old Beeb fans can uninstall Comic Sans…

Syndicated 2008-06-11 20:15:04 (Updated 2008-06-16 13:59:32) from Hexten

Don’t follow me…

…I’m just following a meme.

$ history | awk {'print $2'} | sort | uniq -c | sort -k1 -rn | head
  69 svn
  56 cd
  52 ls
  49 make
  26 perl
  19 vi
  15 tack
  15 cpan
  11 sudo
  11 prove

And actually, I’d have to merge the histories from eight different Terminal.app windows to get a full picture…

Syndicated 2008-04-16 22:08:59 (Updated 2008-04-16 22:09:00) from Hexten

Charging for GPSBabel?

It seems that someone is and I don’t think it’s anyone involved with the project. That page certainly doesn’t look like spam or a scam me.

Syndicated 2008-01-28 20:24:49 (Updated 2008-01-28 20:24:50) from Hexten

Cargo-Culted Optimisations

In Understanding User and Kernel Mode Jeff Atwood says that code that uses exceptions is slow because “exceptions imply kernel mode transitions”. From the ongoing debate in the comments it seems that this may be true for some languages running under .NET that use Window’s Structured Exception Handling but it’s misleading to state that it’s true in the general case.

There are all sorts of reason why exceptions might be slow - they’re just more code the CPU has to execute after all. I worry though about general claims that any idiom is slow. Search a selection of programming blogs for “X is slow” and I guarantee that in the comments someone will say “I never knew that. I’m going to avoid X in future”. I imagine that after a couple of years of cargo-culting these folks are working with a miniscule subset of their chosen language, circumscribed by all those “slow” things that they’re religiously avoiding.

Measure instead of guessing. Look for algorithmic complexity: if you can go from O(N^2) or worse to O(N log N), O(N) or O(1) you might gain far more than a few percent. But then again you might not - so measure.

Syndicated 2008-01-04 12:44:57 (Updated 2008-01-04 12:44:58) from Hexten

Steve Furber CBE

ARM designer Steve Furber has been given a CBE. I believe the appropriate response is “w00t!”.

Syndicated 2007-12-29 01:26:10 (Updated 2007-12-29 01:26:37) from Hexten