A Baudelairean predilection for rotting meat.

Though I’m not the sort of person who believes that native 64-bit compilations of programs will automagically make them perform faster or better, I do like to keep an eye on the state of the art, since I was an early adopter of native 64-bit OSes (I’ve been using 64-bit Linux since about Fedora Core [...]

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§4991 · March 6, 2010 · (No comments) · Tags: , ,

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I’m a big fan of 7-Zip. It isn’t the best-looking application ever written, but that could be because its creator, Igor Pavlov, is concerned much more with its compression methods than its interface. 7-Zip has its own container format, but more important is the LZMA compression algorithm that Igor wrote and put into the public [...]

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§3580 · February 9, 2009 · 1 comment · Tags: , , , , ,


Last year, I moved our small programming department from using JDeveloper and editing shared files directly on a network drive to using Netbeans 6.x and a proper version control system (Subversion). After the initial learning curve, this has all been going swimmingly. I merged my first development branch into the trunk yesterday, and this branch [...]

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§2692 · September 22, 2008 · 3 comments · Tags: , , , , , , ,


Just a few days ago, I compared the relative sizes of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) and OASIS’s OpenDocument format (ODF). I noticed that while OOXML was smaller for smaller amounts of text, ODF was smaller for larger documents. I was curious as to the turning point for this curve, which I hypothesize has to [...]

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§1985 · February 15, 2008 · (No comments) · Tags: , , , ,


A while ago, as OpenOffice.org 2.0 approached completion, I compared the file sizes of Microsoft Office’s binary format against OpenOffice’s new OpenDocument format. Recall that OpenDocument is an XML-based storage formatted that is ultimate compressed into a zip file, creating smaller file sizes. Microsoft’s new Office Open XML is essentially the same thing, but with [...]

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§1977 · February 12, 2008 · 3 comments · Tags: , , , , ,


Every so often, I dink around with benchmarking common lossless compressors. One of the best sites for it is, I think, Werner Bergman’s Maximum Compression, which is a rather comprehensive running benchmark of just about every lossless compression benchmark under the sun. Really, there’s a lot. What you have to understand about the world of [...]

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§1954 · January 19, 2008 · (No comments) · Tags: , , , , ,