I was using a friend's OS X machine briefly, and at one point thought that how the "Movies" folder worked was it acted as an index into the actual filesystem, using some search technology or another to find all of your movies and present them to you. Presenting search results as a directory of files instead of a list (especially with movies, since they are normally a single file that are more or less independent of each other) seemed so obviously user-friendly that I figured that had to be what Apple would do. (Apparently not: my friend said it's just a plain old directory with actual files in it).
Posted in programming at 2007/10/13 16:53; 0 comments
I Must Admit I Don't Quite Understand the Thought Process
A couple of months ago we were interviewing in an attempt to find a C# developer who could write some front ends that would interact with our C++/Python backend trade systems. We phone screened a number of people, and brought a handful in for an afternoon of interviews. One of them had a decent amount of C++ experience, so at one point late in the interview I asked him what features of C# he particularly liked that weren't in C++. His first response was that there were no pointers in C# which prevented a lot of bugs. When I probed further, he also mentioned that the lack of multiple inheritance was really nice.
Posted in programming at 2007/09/07 05:30; 0 comments
Questions I Will Remember (Next Time)
At each company I have worked for, there are things I wish I had known about before accepting.
Posted in programming at 2007/09/07 00:05; 0 comments
I was thinking about the efficiency of programs on our current CPUs and machine architectures, and I've come to the conclusion that they are all inefficient. On one level, that's an incredibly obvious statement - anyone who has done any amount of C and assembly programming knows that a program in Lisp or ML is rather inefficient from the view of machine efficiency. However languages like Lisp and ML also tend to be much more efficient in terms of programmer time, and in most cases that is a more important constraint to optimize for, especially given that the tradeoffs doesn't seem to be linear - taking a slowdown in processor time by a factor of three by writing in Lisp might let you write ten times as much functionality as you could writing the same program in C.
Posted in programming at 2007/05/21 20:00; 0 comments
Was This Obvious To Everyone But Me?
The LCD monitors sold by Dell and Apple (and probably others) have USB hubs built into them. It finally occured to me that it's useful to have the keyboard and mouse run through the hub, because if the monitor is off you (or at least I) don't really want to tap enter and do something bad in a window you couldn't see. There is also the cat factor to consider. If the monitor is off, no inputs are processed; the screen has to be on to enter any inputs. (It's possible this is only for my Dell model, but I'd imagine most others do the same).
Posted in hardware at 2007/05/21 19:56; 0 comments
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