When
· Naughties
· · 2003
· · · March
· · · · 22 (2 entries)
On the Goodness of Binary Search · Anyone who regards themselves as a serious programmer has internalized a lot of different ways of searching: hash tables, binary, and many different kinds of trees. I've used pretty well all of these seriously at some point, but for a decade or so, as far as can I recall I've used almost exclusively binary search, and I see no reason to change that. Herewith an essay for programmers, with fully-worked out examples in Java, on why. [Updated 39 months after publishing when I read with horror Josh Bloch’s exposé of a long-lurking bug. If we can’t get binary search right, what chance do we have with real software?] ...
How to Pay for a Good Read · Some blogger somewhere pointed at an interview with John Brady Kiesling, online at Salon. Sounded interesting - all I knew was that he was a US diplomat who had quit over the run-up to the war, and indeed it was interesting, I recommend reading it, but I hadn't been to Salon recently and was also interested in their “payment options”, which maybe point the way to the future of online publishing ...
