Evan Plaice

3,332 reputation

720

bio	website	code.google.com/p/…
	location	San Diego, CA
	age	28
visits	member for	2 years, 8 months
	seen	22 hours ago
stats	profile views	265

I'm passionate about coding and researching the history of technology as well as exploring where technology is leading.

I used to work in flight simulation doing both hardware implementation (electrical design, wiring), web development (design, development, webmaster), as well as software development (desktop development in C#).

I'm a big fan of both using and contributing to Open source projects.

I am the creator of the pypreprocessor library that can be found on PYPI as well as Google code.

	3,332 reputation	bio	website	code.google.com/p/…	visits	member for	2 years, 8 months
720 badges		location	San Diego, CA		seen	22 hours ago

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Dec 17	comment	Why is multithreading often preferred for improving performance? @user1849534 Not necessarily, 0MQ can work over IPC too. I was just suggesting sockets as a solution that could scale to multiple nodes. If you're only planning to use one node then IPC works just fine.
Dec 16	awarded	Nice Answer
Dec 15	comment	Why is multithreading often preferred for improving performance? (cont) But, honestly if I needed a lot of CPU-bound processing capability I'd skip the actor model and built it to capable of scaling to multiple networking nodes. The best solution I have seen for this is using 0MQ's task ventilator model over socket-level communications. See Fig 5 @ zguide.zeromq.org/page:all.
Dec 15	comment	Why is multithreading often preferred for improving performance? @akka.io You're completely right. Immutability is one way to minimize/eliminate the overhead of locking but you still incur the time cost of context switching. If you'd like to extend the answer to include the details about how immutability can resolve thread synchronization issues, feel free. The main point I was aiming to illustrate is, there are cases where async communication has a distinct advantage over multi-threaded/process and vice versa.
Dec 15	comment	Why is multithreading often preferred for improving performance? @user1849534 Multiple threads can talk to each other via shared memory + locking or IPC. Locking is easier but harder to debug if you make a mistake (ex missed a lock, dead lock). IPC is best if you a have a lot of worker threads because locking doesn't scale well. Either way, if you're using a multi-threaded approach it's important to keep communication/synchronization across threads to an absolute minimum (ie to minimize overhead).
Dec 15	comment	Why is multithreading often preferred for improving performance? @assylias Feel free to substitute 'UI thread' with 'main thread', it doesn't matter. Excessive locking without understanding the effect can easily cancel out any benefits gained from multi-threading. Especially nested thread locks.
Dec 15	comment	Code Smell: Inheritance Abuse In-her-it-ance A-buse: Academic OOP.
Dec 15	comment	Why is multithreading often preferred for improving performance? @assylias To see a significant slow down in the UI thread indicates an excessive amount of locking across threads. You either have a poor implementation or you're trying to pound a square peg into a round hole.
Dec 15	answered	Why is multithreading often preferred for improving performance?
Dec 15	comment	Is the carriage-return char considered obsolete @cHao Did you know that the Linux Kernel just dropped i386 support? Would you call that a waste? I'd call it a good design decision. It drops a dying branch in favor of better support for x64 and ARM processors. Why would you claim I'm pissing on my user's needs? my project's user base is very satisfied with the state of development. I even have a new contributor implementing some features that I haven't had the time to do myself. The user who submitted this is one out of thousands and he fixed the issue by changing a setting in Excel. Problem averted, everybody's happy.
Dec 15	accepted	Is the carriage-return char considered obsolete
Dec 15	comment	Is the carriage-return char considered obsolete @cHao No, of a software has planned obsolescence, room will be made to add new features as old ones are retired. That's the distinguishing quality that makes it maintainable. Unfortunately, almost no software projects are designed with planned obsolescence in mind so most become bloated and die.
Dec 15	comment	Is the carriage-return char considered obsolete @ColeJohnson Feature, or bug? You decide. Isn't notepad only intended for note taking. Whereas, WordPad is a fully featured plaintext/richtext editor? They're the ones responsible for this bug submission in the first place as MS Excel on Mac outputs CSV data using CR line-breaks by default.
Dec 14	comment	Are there architecture smells? @MikeBrown +1 I was being facetious but nice improvement.
Dec 14	comment	Why is Mercurial considered to be easier than Git? "Have you used both?" -nuff said
Dec 14	comment	What's the canonical retort to “it's open source, submit a patch”? @Aaronaught The simple truth is, you're not entitled to an OSS developer's time; no more than you are free to walk this earth without providing something of value. If you can't accept that fact, do all of us Open Source project authors a favor by not using OSS.
Dec 14	comment	What's the canonical retort to “it's open source, submit a patch”? -1 for this answer but +10 for the comments. Time is the currency of Open Source because it's a finite resource. If you're going to make a suggestion, invest some time in refining it. If you want higher priority, draw more users in to request a fix. Be willing to accept a 'no' if your idea doesn't fit into the bigger picture. You're not the only user.
Dec 14	comment	What's the canonical retort to “it's open source, submit a patch”? It doesn't necessarily have to be a patch. Providing detailed and refined feedback also holds worth. All this is saying is, don't expect me to invest my time to cover your specific need if you have nothing to offer in return.
Dec 14	comment	What's the canonical retort to “it's open source, submit a patch”? Time is the currency of OSS. Don't expect much unless you have something of value to offer. Detailed and well thought out suggestions have worth whereas complaints and empty demands are counterproductive (ie worse than worthless).
Dec 14	comment	Torvalds' quote about good programmer Most media lockers (ex iTunes) exploit this fact to create artificial lock-in. They allow data in, but modify it (ex change file names) so it can't be easily extracted. In addition, most meta-data is stored in a platform-specific database format so it's only portable to the same/similar platform.