Really scary dream

I had a dream last night that a nuclear bomb was set off in NYC. Scared the fuck out of me.

But it was weird, I didn't remember the dream until the middle of the day when I was in class. It was a shock to remember it too.

Permalink | 3 Comments | Tags: Personal | id 3920

18:42 (utc-4)

 

Lessons of the war

Via LGF, this great essay by Victor Davis Hanson on Lessons of the War is too long for me to finish reading right now. So, consider this a webmark.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Opinions/Politics | id 3919

00:40 (utc-4)

 

Yet another reason why Acrobat Reader sucks

I was wondering why my free memory on my machine kept slipping away, when if anything I should have been reclaiming memory by closing Firebird tabs. Turns out that a PDF I viewed over an hour ago wound up in Acrobat Reader being left in memory, slowly leaking like someone who's eaten too many Olestra-filled chips.

My system stopped responding because of it, but luckily CTRL+ALT+DEL worked, and when I killed Acrobat I shot up to about 35-40% resources free. Not only that, but significantly, Acrobat Reader, once opened, keeps itself permanently in memory. Asshole.

Permalink | 2 Comments | id 3918

00:31 (utc-4)
edited: 00:49 (utc-4)

 

PugXML - A Small, Pugnacious XML Parser

Via Martin, PugXML looks like a neat project:

Presented is a small, fast, non-validating DOM XML parser, contained in a single header, having no dependencies other than the standard C libraries, and <iostream> (KERNEL32.DLL with WIN32). This XML parser segments a given string in situ (like strtok), performing scanning/tokenization, and parsing in a single pass. Preliminary analysis shows a best-case of 22 X86 CPU clock cycles average per input byte, and a worst-case of 108 CPU cycles...

Cool. What other project do you know that meaures its efficency in best case and worse case numbers of machine instructions? And it has a full finite state machine diagram and everything! Rock on. Full (and very small! 29k) source code available.

Side note:

... however parsers checking for well-formedness would choke on it. Because this is not compliant behavior, the PugXML parser, and parsers taking a similar approach would be indicated for situations requiring the parsing of machine-generated, well-formed fully-compliant XML documents, and not human-generated documents.

One of the problems with XML is there's just so much of it out there that isn't.

Permalink | Comments? | Tags: Programming | id 3917

00:19 (utc-4)
edited: 00:33 (utc-4)

 

Internet Explorer OS Integration

Joe echoes my thoughts exactly:

If Microsoft thinks customers, given the choice of upgrading their operating system or changing to a different browser, are going to choose to pay money to upgrade their operating system, then someone needs to check what they're drinking in Redmond.

Also see this post for some background.

Also, some more information from MozillaZine.

Permalink | Comments? | id 3916

00:07 (utc-4)
edited: 19:06 (utc-4)