Entropy always increases: Visualising sorting algorithms.

Lovely way of visualizing sorting. I especially like the visualization of the "divide and conquer" algorithm:

If you are interested in high-performance programming on Windows, you know the name Joe Duffy, whose book Concurrent Programming On Windows is absolutely top-notch.

Today he posted an intriguing notice on his blog "We are hiring." Check out some of the things he says:

My team's responsibility spans multiple aspects …

Apropos of something I'm not quite ready to talk about, here is an interesting challenge:

How do you optimize your time at the telescope if you have a set of objects that you'd like to observe?

For instance, if you want to see as many Messier objects as you can …

I'm doing some exploration of "Big Data" and data mining (fun!) and came across this interesting presentation:

The following time series is converted to string "acdbbdca":

I read the new book "The Grand Design" by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow yesterday (it's a short book and if you're comfortable with the differences between "the Universe," "the visible Universe," and "the Metaverse" it's easy-enough going). The book is getting a lot of press for its repeated assertion …

The number of 7-bullet-per-slide PowerPoint presentations seems to be declining, but "Steal This Presentation" is a useful source of advice. On the other hand, if you're presenting to developers, please don't hesitate to have the occasionally semantically-precise slide.

The worst thing about developing for the Mac or iOS is Objective C. Obj-C was a heck of a good experiment 20 years ago, but it's just not a good fit for today's mainstream programming mindset. In the wake of Apple's relenting on the use of 3rd party language tools …

Saikuro : A Cyclomatic Complexity Analyzer.

Function complexity does not seem to be a great problem in the Ruby world, but tracking cyclomatic complexity is one of those things that can help pinpoint troubled modules.

Big news in the Apple development arena this morning: Apple has relented on the ill-advised license restriction on developing for iPhone / iPad with tools created by 3rd parties. The restrictions were introduced in the Spring, just in time to quash Adobe's launch of a Flash-to-iOS cross-compiler, but caught in the …