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Move the viewport, not the world! 23 Apr 2012 | 02:45 am
Two separate posts on gamedev.stackexchange.com drew my attention. It appears that some game programmers are getting it WRONG. Superficially, it seems that in some games (think of scrolling games wit...
Expecting the unexpected 24 May 2011 | 07:19 am
Few developers consider, when trying to build robust platforms, all the possible modes of failure. Indeed, it is difficult to consider them all, let alone plan for them, or design tests which exercise...
HTML 2d Canvas upscaling - really inefficient 20 Feb 2011 | 09:33 pm
I started writing some test programs with the HTML canvas element. This is great, as you can actually write games in Javascript - efficiently - in principle. My previous attempts have all used the DO...
MySQL, what are you smoking? 27 May 2010 | 04:59 am
There are a lot of weird things which MySQL does to handle its mix of transactional and non-transactional behaviour, but this one was new to me :) What's going on? MySQL does not consider (some) erro...
Streaming data from MySQL 25 Apr 2010 | 10:49 pm
How do we stream data from MySQL? Traditionally, developers have thought that they can simply use their API's cursor-equivalent object (e.g. resultset) and move through the results. Unfortunately, th...
What is Cassandra good for 30 Nov 2009 | 02:31 am
The Cassandra database has been getting quite a lot of publicity recently. I think this is a good thing in general, but it seems that some people are considering using it for unsuitable purposes. Cas...
When commit appears to fail 28 Oct 2009 | 08:15 am
So you're using explicit transactions. Everything appears to work (every query gives the expected result) until you get to COMMIT. Then you get an exception thrown from COMMIT. What happened? Usuall...
On mysql's myisam_block_size setting 3 Sep 2009 | 12:00 am
There is a little-known setting, myisam_block_size in MySQL. This affects the block size used in the indexes of MyISAM tables stored in .MYI files on disc and in the key buffer. The default value is ...
Cassandra database and range scans 7 Aug 2009 | 05:19 am
I've been doing a little more playing with Cassandra, an open source distributed database. It has several features which make it very compelling for storing large data which has a lot of writes: Writ...
Distributed data storage systems 30 Mar 2009 | 05:21 am
I'm looking for a distributed data storage system. Ideally such a system would have some (or ideally all) of the following characteristics: Software only, using shared-nothing (must) Stores arbitrar...
