http://www.ctoforaday.com/ The Professional Journal of Gregory Block en-us 2006-02-03T10:50:09+00:00 http://www.ctoforaday.com/archives/000049.html We've had a tough time - we've got... actually, we had... a build system which is hard to beat, in some ways. Maven was up against a strong contender. Our old build system knows where it's being built - each... Technology gblock 2006-02-03T10:50:09+00:00 http://www.ctoforaday.com/archives/000048.html Though this is a complete review of my first 48 hours with the MachFive sampler, I thought I'd leave you, first, with the conclusion. Begin at the End There is more that is negative within the first 48 hours... Software gblock 2006-01-29T15:24:26+00:00 http://www.ctoforaday.com/archives/000046.html I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the best possible performance out of our Lucene implementation at WhatsOnWhen; we have an awful lot of information, all of which is only valid for a range... Software gblock 2005-11-16T11:18:39+00:00 http://www.ctoforaday.com/archives/000045.html <h2>Dishonorable Kills vs. Zerging</h2> In order to protect townships from being zerged, the first major damage to be done to the mindset of “PVP means anything goes” was the system of “Dishonor”; perform enough dishonorable kills, and it wipes out all of your honor gains.... We'll ignore the actual bugs for the moment that make it occasionally unplayable, or that people use to cheat their way to the top - we can assume that those are artifacts of any software development project in use by a population with something to gain from locating and using bugs to their own advantage; arguably, in fact, the reason these games seem so buggy is that there are so many people with such strongly vested interests in finding and manipulating the system - doing so unfortunately provides a reward.

]]> Personal gblock 2005-08-03T17:02:39+00:00 http://www.ctoforaday.com/archives/000044.html Things worthy of note: it still sucks on a mac. To prove this, I can't tell which process is "on cpu", as you can on Linux top; I've therefore marked as "on cpu" all processes which have CPU time,... Software gblock 2004-12-20T08:53:12+00:00 http://www.ctoforaday.com/archives/000042.html I did a bit of hacking up of the java scripts for parsing, and the shell scripts for executing, the bootloader analysis work done by the guys over at http://www.klika.si/ziga/bootchart/, the Boot Process Performance Visualisation tool recently developed to... Software gblock 2004-12-18T20:38:27+00:00 http://www.ctoforaday.com/archives/000041.html And there's nothing more satisfying than torturing literature; so in the spirit of the Obfuscated C contests... Software gblock 2004-08-17T11:53:01+00:00 http://www.ctoforaday.com/archives/000040.html In an article on DowningStreetSays, there has been some commentary which I wish to reply to directly, in a place that I can find later, on what appears to be a discussion on the downfall of Western Civilization... Personal gblock 2004-08-10T20:10:44+00:00 http://www.ctoforaday.com/archives/000039.html I've gone ahead and done the necessary porting to get memcached up and running on Windows. As we use it for our core platform at WhatsOnWhen in our java framework as a 'long term' serialization cache for JDO objects and general data cache, we rely on it heavily - not only for good database performance, but for good performance of the application, as it loads and manages thousands of JDO objects for our location hierarchy and related data. Software gblock 2004-08-06T09:33:27+00:00 http://www.ctoforaday.com/archives/000038.html A review of a review of Tiger... Technology gblock 2004-06-29T10:27:01+00:00 http://www.ctoforaday.com/archives/000037.html The following article contains a reference to some tests done on a DP of Java 1.4.2 on a Mac; some tests, namely those from the PC, are on an unknown Acer. As the article says, the relative performance is the crucial issue here, not the actual numbers. The systems in these tests are by no means 'high performance' systems; they're both PowerBook systems, and old ones at that. Software gblock 2004-06-20T18:46:31+00:00 http://www.ctoforaday.com/archives/000036.html You are in a twisty maze of an e-zine web page. Before you is a banner ad. To the south are two magazine ads. Other gblock 2004-06-11T14:12:39+00:00 http://www.ctoforaday.com/archives/000032.html Microsoft's release of specifications for Longhorn has many implications for the 3D graphics market, and the latest releases from NVidia and ATI, which will essentially be the low-end requirements for Longhorn's new visuals, lay the ground for the great, looming battle over market share; which company will benefit from Microsoft's change of design? Technology gblock 2004-05-06T22:36:48+00:00 http://www.ctoforaday.com/archives/000031.html Sure, we love our machines, we say, when they work. But you can't drop them, they don't survive even minor earthquakes without losing all of your data, and, unforgettably, they're very touchy about being switched off while they're busy. Personal gblock 2004-04-22T23:29:03+00:00 http://www.ctoforaday.com/archives/000030.html Research into 3D technology has been hotter than ever over the last few years, and there is a raft of new technology being deployed in the generation after the next that are worth considering. These revolutionary changes represent a major step forward in the capabilities and realism of the technology - and stand to provide the kind of difference betweeen the 3D games of today and the immersive games of tomorrow that we were familiar with when 2D gaming became 3D gaming all those years ago. Technology gblock 2004-03-29T20:03:21+00:00