Why I hate Java

I ran into this fun time while trying to install the Scala bindings to Neo4j.

First, I had to install Maven:

Test of org-googlecl

I heard about this great project called Org-GoogleCL, which allows for publishing of blog posts to Google's Blogger from within Emacs' Org-Mode. This is a test of that library.

Hmm, there seem to be some issues with it not posting the full thing. I'll have to dive into the code at some point…

Edit: Oh, looks like it is working now. Still are some problems with filling paragraphs, though.

On the value of knowing the lower levels

While digging around some of the Python documentation (read: procrastinating), I stumbled across this section comparing Python performance to C in some very simple and contrived "benchmarks." The point of the section was that Python is not C, and you should be careful when trying to apply knowledge of C to Python. On a simple test of adding i to itself 10 million times, Python was about 50 times slower than C (which isn't really surprising, given that the C code just executes a series of single assembly addl instructions).

On cluelessness and racial self-identification

This was a response to Eric Raymond's recent blog post about "the perils of ethnic identification" and why his racial identity isn't a big deal to him. It is an interesting article in its own right, but my response was prompted by a comment made by a "William O. B'Livion", in which he said:

FroYo on the Droid, a Browser Benchmark Update

Yesterday I rooted my Droid to install the "FRG01" leaked version of Android 2.2 (FroYo) for my Droid. I figured I'd run the SunSpider browser benchmark again to see what (if anything) had changed as far as the browser went. I knew that there were supposed to be speed improvements in FroYo, both to the underlying Android system and also with the browser specifically, so I figured I'd put the fancy new JIT to the test.

The great smartphone/pad shootout!

While waiting for my Droid to be serviced at the Verizon store, I went down to the Apple store in the mall to check out the much-ballyhooed iPad. I'll save my full reactions for later (though it's not anything you haven't heard before) to bring you a comparison of browser speed between the iPad and Droid.

A Response to "Victimology bites"

This started out as a comment on Eric Raymond's "Victimology bites" blog post, but got long enough that I figured I'd turn it into its own blog post.