A design for a Scheme web application framework (by alaric)

While sitting on a train yesterday, I typed up some thoughts...

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Fault tolerant Web hosting (by alaric)

As Sarah reminded me, I should blog my article:

Fault-tolerant Web hosting on a shoestring

24-core CPU (by alaric)

Hurrah:

SEAforthâ„¢-24A Embedded Array Processor

I'd been hoping something would come of this since I first came across the original design.

I still think much more RAM is needed, though. As it stands it'd be great for processing most kinds of streamed data, where you don't need to store much context, but for more general purpose applications, much more RAM is required, and with a high-bandwidth link to the processors that need it, too...

Annoying visual flaw (by alaric)

Grrr, it's a little thing, but it somehow really bugs me that there's a graphical flaw in one of the icons in Mac OS X's Software Update utility:

(I added the red arrow)

You can tell how it happened, too - somebody was using Photoshop or whatnot to fade the ends of the arrows, and didn't finish the job properly.

Efficient Software (by alaric)

Efficiency is a major goal for programmers. It used to be a much bigger goal; once upon a time, it was a struggle to fit useful applications into machines with 1MHz clocks, which took several clock cycles to perform basic operations on 16-bit values. You had to optimise even quite basic algorithms to get them to complete in acceptable timeframes.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the available computing power and memory for running an application exploded, but the sizes of data sets people wanted to work with grew in step. Now people wanted to word process documents with large images. Or keep databases of EVERYTHING. So efficiency was still a big concern for application programmers. But the focus began to shift.

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