Warren MacEvoy

Let me begin by a philosophical rant. There is a motto from scientific computing that carries to many areas of computer science: /The gains made by better algorithms almost always outstrip the gains from better hardware./ I've frequently seen where algorithm improvements pay by factors of tens to tens of thousands in CPU time. One change I made in a numerical algorithm improved CPU requirements by a factor of 50,000: from weeks on a super-computer to minutes on a workstation. Any business-savvy engineer knows that algorithm improvements come at a price: the engineer's time. Striking that balance makes software systems move forward rather than staggering to a halt in bloat and dysfunction. It also helps to use people who actually know what they are doing: knowing how to ... (more)

Lazy Programmers Can Make Cache Today

Let me begin with a philosophical rant. There is a motto from scientific computing that carries over to many areas of computer science: The gains made by better algorithms almost always outstrip the gains from better hardware. I've frequently seen where algorithm improvements pay by factors of ten to tens of thousands in CPU time. One change I made in a numerical algorithm improved CPU r... (more)

Skilled Listening in Java

There are many good resources on using events and implementing event listeners. Unfortunately, there are nearly as many resources that incorrectly or inefficiently implement event generators. These implementations introduce subtle nondeterministic errors, execute slowly, and/or fill the virtual machine with unnecessary garbage. The goal of this article is to address this problem once and... (more)

BPP: The Beanshell Preprocessor

The Beanshell preprocessor, or BPP for short, is intended to be a convenient and powerful preprocessing tool for Java developers. It's convenient because the preprocessor is based on Beanshell, which is essentially interpreted Java. This means that Java or Beanshell programmers can quickly use all of BPP's features. It's powerful for the same reasons: all the power of the Java SDK with t... (more)