Oh the wasted cycles

An assignment I have at the moment is a simple cache simulator, as I think I’ve said before. Anyway, I thought the code was all done – all good. The results made sense, and it seemed to correspond with what dineroIV (a popular and powerful open source cache simulator, which we’re using as our reference, … Read more

Real-time backup

An idea I had a while ago was to implement a real-time backup system, which saves copies of files as they’re modified to a 2nd location. In the simplest form this would be a kind of manual mirrored RAID setup, which could work at the directory or volume level rather than disk level. The problem … Read more

Introduction

I should explain this category before I go full hog into it. I’ve just read an article which looks in quite some detail at the “science of happiness” – in particular how modern psychology is adapting (or, failing) to look at happiness in a more methodical manner. Particularly in relation to “interventions” (treatments), which have … Read more

Altruism

I had an argument last night with someone as to whether altruism exists or not. Their argument was essentially “of course it does”. They used the example of a car accident they were in a while ago, in which they were very nearly killed, but they still consoled the driver of the other car (whom … Read more

Wasted memory by Foundation & AppKit

It bothers me that the iiUsage menu item, which takes up an entire 50mm^2 on my menu bar, uses 20 meg of memory. All it does it connect to a web server periodically, perform some sort of [probably trivial] parsing to extract it’s numbers, and display those in it’s menu. What on earth does it … Read more