When
· Naughties
· · 2006
· · · June
· · · · 15 (3 entries)

More Binary-Search Breakage · Peter Luschny writes in with yet another way to break my supposedly bullet-proof binary search algorithm. You’re searching an array of whatevers; well suppose that array is declared:
Whatever[] w = new Whatever[Integer.MAX_VALUE * 2];
I checked, and Java will compile that happily. Binary search fall down go boom. Sigh. So, if you think you might have more than a couple billion elements in your array, you’d be better off declaring all your indexing variables as long. (Which should be free on a 64-bit computer, right?) I’ll go update the binary-search article to add this caution. [Update: Maybe not. Greg Thompson and A. Sundararajan both point out that the Java Language Definition requires array indices to be integers, not longs. So I wonder why this compiles?]
 
Time to Switch? · Early this month, Mark Pilgrim made waves when he went shopping for a new Mac, but decided not to buy one, and, in When the bough breaks, wrote at length about switching to Ubuntu. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, and now John Gruber’s written And Oranges, a fine excursus on Mark’s piece. I’m pondering the switch away myself, too, and maybe sharing my thoughts will be helpful. [Update: Lots of feedback on the state of the Ubuntu art.] [Update: More from Mark. I feel sick, physically nauseated, that Apple has hidden my email—the record of my life—away in a proprietary undocumented format. I’ve had this happen once before (the culprit was Eudora); fool me twice, shame on me. Hear a funny sound? That’s a camel’s back, breaking.]  ...
 
Why SavaJe? · A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my rather mixed initial experience of the SavaJe Jasper S20. I’m making progress, and I’m going to invest a bit more work in this device, because I think it’s important. In this fragment I explain why I think so, with a bit more hands-on narrative ...
 
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