Monthly Archives: April 2011

Sloptimize

hide-first-let­ter slop·ti·mize | slop·ti·mized | slop·ti·miz·ing verb To make a pro­gram run faster by decreas­ing the accu­ra­cy of its out­put. Examples of slop­ti­mize We slop­ti­mized the cal­cu­la­tions to use 32-bit floats instead of 64-bit dou­bles, and got a 20% speedup.

April 21, 2011 – 5:16 pm | By Evan | Posted in Programming, Words That Aren't but Should Be | Tagged , | Comments (2)

Please Don’t Request User Input in the Middle of a Lengthy Task

It’s hap­pened to every­one. You kick off a soft­ware installer, answer a few ques­tions about how you’d like things set up, click next and you’re pre­sent­ed with a long progress bar. “No prob­lem,” you think to your­self, “this is a good excuse to grab a cup­pa joe.” You leave the com­put­er to its busi­ness and […]

April 8, 2011 – 1:37 am | By Evan | Posted in Programming, Stories | Tagged , , , | Comments (12)

Introducing cppsh: A bash-Like Shell with C++ Syntax

It’s been a long time in the mak­ing, but I am proud to announce the first beta release of cppsh, the bash-like shell specif­i­cal­ly designed for those engi­neers who find them­selves most com­fort­able at the reins of a C++ com­pil­er. The best fea­tures from both bash and the C++ lan­guage come togeth­er in cppsh to […]

April 1, 2011 – 12:07 am | By Evan | Posted in Programming | Tagged , , | Comments (11)