Notes and Jottings

Russell Beattie “reviews”:http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1007167.html “Clevercactus Share”:http://www.clevercactus.com/.

Most of Russell’s issues with the application are to do with its use of Swing. I am still undecided about Swing–it is certainly possible to create a dog of a UI with any technology. Redrawing issues are problematic for a lot of systems. And this is still a beta product, and it’s extremely usable. Redrawing can be a bit slow at the moment when redisplaying the full window if it was hidden. See the comment on it being beta. Other people know far more than me about the ins and outs of Swing programming–I’ll leave it to them to discuss what’s possible or not.

To get away from that issue, what I’ve seen so far looks great! It is obvious how to use the program, it seems very easy to use. P2P sharing and chat. In work, we’ve vaguely considered a replacement for Yahoo IM, because it’s a centralised point that all our messages go through, with all the attendant privacy issues, etc. As a P2P app, this should run around that (though it still needs a central server for some parts of its operation). The only other reasonable option in the past for chat has been a Jabber server. People aren’t interested in IRC (in general)–and why oh why are some people (yes, you!) using ICB?? I think if it works like it looks, I will push at least for a beta test, see how people like it.

I may post another review once I actually get to chat or share files with somebody–my only contact at the moment may have problems with his service provider dropping/blocking UDP packets. Yes, you need UDP access to the Internet, but otherwise it should work from behind firewalls, even where both users are on private networks behind a NAT proxy.

This weekend, I’ve been looking at improving the scalability of some algorithms in one of our products at work. Today, I’ve replaced a linked list with a basic “priority queue”:http://www.nist.gov/dads/HTML/priorityque.html. It’s written, it compiles, and the most basic sanity tests now work without crashes. I’m happy
Next step is to perform some more gruelling sanity tests, and load ‘er up with around 100,000 items to check if the change actually improved things. With O(lg N) worst-case addition and deletion–as opposed to the previous O(N)–I’m optimistic that it improves the situation. Have to see how performance is impacted for small numbers of items–hopefully performance loss at that end of the spectrum will be minimal.

A “good summary”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/002737.html of the issues exposed by Richard Clarke’s interview. Basically, it appears that the US administration may have focused on the wrong issues in protecting their country before 9/11, and then continued to focus on the wrong issues thereafter, misleading themselves and their constituents.

Somebody decided to delete all of my website, so about 2Gb or so of photos are irreversably missing. I guess I’ll be starting from scratch again, with backups this time!
I always meant to organise an rsync with my machine at home, pity that never happened…