I don’t use recipes to ensure the quality of my software. Most of those development tasks to make the software a reliable tool are techniques learned along the time, without considering the methodology behind the software development. I can’t stand for any methodology as the better methodology that you can use. I just follow few commandments or rules on software development, and all of them bring me good results.

"…premature optimization is the root of all evil".
— Donald Knuth

I agree with the fact that we must do our source code level optimizations when we have finshed the construction stage or it is almost complete. I was searching articles and papers about optimizing C source code to be applied on my programs and libraries. I’ve collected some of those optimizations. But you must not confuse algorithm optimization, source code optimization and compiler optimization, since the first one refers to algorithm design and the second one just refers to the algorithm implementation, and both are sharing just few common approaches to formal reductions.

As you have seen in my last post, I’ve been working on some strong changes on pyxser. Today I’ve released pyxser-1.4r and the announcement message:

pyxser, my Python-Object to XML serializer is suffering few changes, but important ones. The main change is the fact that I will add a type map optional parameter for deserialization functions. How should it work?

Java synchronization is usually made through the synchronized keyword. Synchronized allow users to create a mutex around certain variable, class or method, where a mutex allows concurrent access to it. By concurrent access we should understand access from multiple threads. If an operation is atomic, there one and only one process or thread executing it. Then, mutex based operations are atomic.

Dear pyxser users, I’m pleased to announce that I’ve released pyxser-1.3r. The current ChangeLog for this release is as follows (Update: There was bug in the pyxser-1.3r release, it is patched and working in pyxser-1.3r-p1):

My experience with Functional Programming Languages is small. I’ve been writing small hacks for emacs lisp, such as hooks for certain modes and actions for a while, and sometimes building small tools in SBCL. Someone on Internet has recommended me an interesting book about Haskell called "Real World Haskell", that may be read on-line. I’ve been reading the book in my free time, and playing with the Haskell syntax, building small functions and playing with data type. So the result of those games is a small program that I want to share with you.