A comparison of desktop memory usage, pitting KDE, Gnome, XFCE, and Plain XFree against each other in the battle for the smallest footprint.

What every programmer should know about memory, Part 1, a very thorough look at current generation memory architecture for programmers.

A few interesting libraries: D store, an in-memory database abstraction, and Vstr, a secured, scalable string library.

A possible approach for browser history in Firefox, from the mind of a Firefox developer.

A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data PDF (local cache) describes Google’s gargantuan distributed storage system. One of the most amazing aspects of the system’s develompent was the scale that they tested it at:

The tablet servers were configured to use 1 GB of memory and to write to a GFS cell consisting of 1786 machines with two 400 GB IDE hard drives each.

I regularly hear developers complain about how difficult it is to set up realistic tests. I think those developers are just lazy, unskilled, or working for the wrong company.

Making the Butterfly Beep
“Imagine a pretty powerful microprocessor that can be programmed in C or Assembler, that has 512K of non-volatile (EEPROM) memory, a LCD display, a joystick for user navigation, a small piezo speaker for sound, a real time clock … and what really dropped my jaw: you can buy it for $20 from Digi-Key, and you need nothing besides free software and a simple serial connection cable to start developing applications for it.”

Flash Memory to Replace Hard Drives in Portables?
One more sign of the move towards ubiquitous computing, with low power (and new sources of power) being one of the limiting factors that the deep trend is forcing companies to re-think or route around. I’ve been wondering how long until this happens too, despite the new-fangled tiny-harddrives.

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