Science & Code

• Felix August 21, 2008

  Data Structures 101: Linked Lists

  Code, Tutorial

  Rumor says that the success of Microsoft Excel was solely to the fact that it used doubly linked lists for its spreadsheets, resulting in a great performance gain compared to competing programs. The truth is probably more complicated; nevertheless, excel was successful because of a smart update-strategy of the spreadsheet cells (not all were updated, only the ones changed and affected by the change). A smart choice of data structures (and algorithms) can therefore be crucial for program performance and thus for economic success.

  According to Wikipedia, linked lists were developed as early as 1955/56 — one certainly can measure their impact on the fact that linked lists still belong to the commonly taught data structures.
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• Felix August 13, 2008

  Mobicom 2008

  General

  It’s official! Michael, Nano and I are going to San Francisco next month. We will present a demo on the Mobicom 2008 and use this opportunity to take a look around California.

  That also means that there probably won’t be much activity on this blog until then, the demo needs to be finished.

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• Felix August 3, 2008

  Awfully Chocolate (I want only)

  General

  No, that is not the title of the latest underground indie garage-trash-popcore band. During our visit to Beijing Michael in I stumbled over uncountable samples of creatively used English, like the already mentioned IT’S NOW. I tried to capture as many as possible, though some where quite a challenge — try photographing funny signs in a temple and you’ll soon feel the wrath of several angry Chinese protecting their Buddhas (seriously, be careful if you want to photograph those!). This marks the start to a series of posts about the adventures of two lucky computer science students in China, beginning with

  My top eight sign sightings in Beijing

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• Felix August 2, 2008

  Actionscript optimization

  Code, General, Tutorial

  Since the introduction of actionscript and the beginning of game development with flash (and, more recently, with Flex oder similar tools) performance was always a big topic in the game developer community. A common source for benchmarks are the oddhammer actionscript performance tests which give a nice overview of actionscript behavior. Sadly, no benchmark is available for AS3.0; but there are enough resources out there dealing with the topic.

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