[atxgpsig] EEEK! Second Saturday is almost here!

[Bob Pendleton <bob@pendleton.com>]

My brain has been occupied with... all sorts of things I proved I can't
read a calendar. I thought next week was the second Saturday in
December. To pay penance and to try to ween some of you over from the
dark side (Krispy Kreme) I will bring Round Rock donuts to the meeting. 

The next meeting of the ATXGPSIG will be at 1:30 p.m. at the ACC
Highland Business Center (http://www.austincc.edu/locations/hbc.php) in
room 103.2 which is the first room on the right as you enter the
building. The topic will be (do we need a topic if we have donuts?)
"Getting it done" and your worst horror stores about being a programmer.
To get people started you might want to read:

http://www.gameai.com/youknow.html
http://www.gameai.com/youmight.html
http://www.gameai.com/lastwords.html


let me tell one on myself... I'm kind of an odd teacher in that I do all
the home work that I assign to my students. And, since I am a programmer
I can't resist the urge to tinker with the code each time I teach the
class. I recently (last year) started using a sheep versus wolves
simulation as a project. So, this semester I was fiddling with it. I had
just spent most of 3 hours talking about optimization and how *not* to
do optimization so of course, I had to do some optimization on my
code....

So, I did it the right way, I turned on the profiler and collected lots
of stats. I then used them to find a few "high runners" and fix them. I
kept fiddling with it for several days. Well, when I was done I wanted
to see how much good I had done... That was when I realized that I had
ignored one of the most important lessons of optimization; don't
optimize if it is already fast enough. It was only at the end when I was
trying to figure out how much good I had done that I realized that I was
trying to optimize code that already used less than 1% of the CPU. In
precentage differences I was a hero, I think my several days of work
dropped CPU usage to 0.09%...

Remember, a millisecond is a really really really long time.

	Happy Hacking,

		Bob Pendleton

-- 
+--------------------------------------+
+ Bob Pendleton: writer and programmer +
+ email: Bob@Pendleton.com             +
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