Archive for the 'Tech' Category

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Expensive watches

The world of watches is a strange place. The best watches tend to be relatively inexpensive, while some rather poor watches are priced out of range of all but the very wealthy. By “best” and “poor”, I’m referring not to subjective things like aesthetics. I’m not even going to bother thinking about whether a Gucci watch is “better” than a Prada watch. I don’t give a rat’s ass about either of them. I mean the qualities that watchmakers have striven for centuries to achieve: accuracy, reliability, and useful features.

It’s pretty common knowledge that a $20 Timex is much more accurate than a $20,000 Patek Phillipe. From a purely practical point of view, the Timex is a better watch in almost every respect. So why is it that I am so drawn to look at these crazy expensive mechanical watches?

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.NET Garbage Collector making me batty, again

I wrote previously about two things I had learned, through great pain, about the .NET garbage collector.

Now I have another lesson to add to that.

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Delay-loading assemblies in .NET

I was trying to find a .NET equivalent to the “/delayload” option that the linker has for unmanaged code. For the uninitiated, “/delayload:someDLL.dll” changes the resulting .EXE/.DLL so that someDLL.dll will not be loaded until the first time a function in it is called. It’s a handy option you can use so that you do not need to install someDLL.dll on computers where you know it’s not going to be needed.
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.NET garbage collector making me batty

I’ve spent a few days trying to track down a garbage collection problem in some code I’ve been working on.  I finally figured it out. Along the way, I’ve learned more about .NET garbage collection than I ever wanted to know, and discovered a useful tool to help with these kinds of problems.

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Large Hadron Collider

The world’s most powerful particle-accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, is scheduled to be switched on for the first time tomorrow. There are assorted kooks who believe that the LHC will destroy the world in one or more of the following ways:

The whole thing is reminiscent of the fear many years ago that the first atomic bomb test would burn the entire atmosphere of the planet.

There another possibility that the kooks don’t seem to have considered. The LHC may open a gateway to a parallel universe full of evil creatures.

In the background... isn't that Dr. Gordon Freeman of the disastrous Black Mesa project?

In the background... isn't that Dr. Gordon Freeman of the disastrous Black Mesa project?

Here is a page with some really amazing pictures of the LHC under construction.

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