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rbrown46

32 karma · joined March 22, 2011

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rbrown46··on Apple introduces a universal design across platforms
Cook saw it through, but Apple began moving towards replacing Intel back in 2008 (under Jobs) when they acquired P.A. Semi.
rbrown46··on How to make smaller C and C++ binaries
I’ve gotten good insight into what takes up space in binaries by profiling with Bloaty McBloatface. My last profiling session showed that clang’s ThinLTO was inlining too aggressively in some cases, causing functions that should be tiny to be 75 kB+.

https://github.com/google/bloaty

rbrown46··on A longevity diet that hacks cell ageing could add years to your life
This a summary of an open access article published in Cell: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)00398-1

The longevity diet identifies six steps designed to increase lifespan by promoting lean body mass and healthy blood sugar levels, switching off the body's central pro-ageing system and ramping up an anti-ageing process called autophagy:

1. Limit calorie intake to maintain a body mass index of 22 to 23 for men and 21 to 22 for women.

2. Eat a diet high in wholegrains, legumes and nuts. Stop eating meat to restrict intake of the amino acid methionine, but include some fish.

3. Aim to get between 45 and 60 per cent of calories from non-refined complex carbohydrates, 10 to 15 per cent from plant-based proteins and 25 to 35 per cent from plant-based fats.

4. Do a limited daily fast, eating no calories from around 3 hours before bedtime and for the next 11 to 12 hours.

5. Every two to three months, undertake five days of a fasting-mimicking diet.

6. Alcohol is allowed in small amounts, but no more than 5 units a week.

rbrown46··on Code Reviews and Bad Habits
We've been using Opera Critic (https://github.com/jensl/critic) where I work for about half a year. We did trial runs with Gerrit, Barkeep and Phabricator before settling on it. My impression is that its almost completely unknown outside of Opera, which is surprising given the feature set, clean UI and active development. The site used to review branches for the Critic project is also a demo: https://critic-review.org

It supports the model of having many atomic, reviewable commits on a topic branch. Where it seems to exceed Kiln is in the rebase/fixup workflow. You can push fixup commits in response to issues left by a reviewer. A fixup commit will automatically mark an issue it addresses as resolved when you push based on the lines it changes (the fixup must also be reviewed). You can later rebase the branch to integrate the fixups. It's pretty clever, and the way fixups are shown lets you see at a glance how the branch has evolved.

As a reviewer, and as someone who often digs through five year old commits, I want feature branches to follow the most linear path possible. Approaches that are started and abandoned, and commits made on top of a branch in response to review feedback are noise. A well-crafted branch often has little to do with what happened during development.

rbrown46··on The Genius Who Perished on Flight 11
On another occasion, Lewin called Linux, which made servers in North Carolina, to say Akamai needed around 1,000 servers in four weeks. The company said such a large order wasn’t possible; they needed more time. Instead of pleading with them,  Lewin sent them an e-mail to confirm a deadline of four weeks. That night, he went to the hardware store and bought tool kits,  flew to North Carolina with some of his best engineers, and showed up to work at Linux the next morning. A baffled employee said, “Sir, who are you here to see?” Lewin replied: “I’m not here to see anyone; I’m here to build servers.” Within four weeks, he’d helped Linux construct more than 1,000 new servers.

Linux. Right.

rbrown46··on Objective-C literals for NSDictionary, NSArray, and NSNumber
This is the second time (to my knowledge, may have been going on for a while) that an Xcode beta has been made available to only one of the two (Mac and iOS) developer programs. The Xcode 4.3 beta was only available to iOS developers -- despite containing bug fixes and improvements useful to developers on both platforms. Now the Xcode 4.4 beta is only available to Mac developers.

I really don't see the logic in withholding from paying members of either platform.

rbrown46··on C++11 Makes Competitors Go Rusty
#pragma once aside, I agree that not having to worry about writing and including headers at all is a significant improvement of Go over C++.
rbrown46··on When it comes to presentation, Mark Zuckerberg is no Steve Jobs
http://apps.facebook.com/facebooklive/
rbrown46··on Inaugural release of Apache Lucy, Version 0.1.0
I tried to get into Lucene (using SOLR) recently but was put off by it's complexity for what was, in my case, a simple use case (searching through a large document set of html, txt, and doc files quickly using proximity search).

After futzing for hours with XSLT and writing scripts to submit content via the REST API, I found out about FTS4 in SQLite, and was impressed by it's relative simplicity. I had something working in under an hour in Python.

rbrown46··on How to beat Apple
Jobs does use Mail (on both the iPhone and the Mac – as can be seen from examining the headers of his widely publicized emails)... and plenty of people aren't exactly fans of that application.