Recently I needed to quickly (and non-destructively) test the read / write performance of a flash drive of mine. Naturally, I turned my attention to my terminal. This post is me documenting what I did so that I can remember for next time :P Firstly, to test the speed of a disk, we need some data to test with. Since lots of small files will inevitably cause slowdowns due tot he overhead of writing… Read more →

Ha. Nobody seemed to know this. Or nobody cared....Anyhoo, the question was:"When would a value type be stored on the heap?" And no, the answer doesn't involve boxing.A value type just holds a value. Not a reference to something. If I have an object managed by reference I have to be careful about removing it from memory, because I need to be sure that nothing in the program is referring to the obj… Read more →

As I'm writing my text about C# I'm finding more and more situations where I'm saying "Leave your worries about performance until the end of development". Read more →

Now doing some stuff on string interning in C#. For some reason I have this picture of a program that gets young people in to work as strings and pays them nothing. However this is not actually how it works..... Read more →

This was the question:Can I make some C# that compiles and contains these two statements? What type are d and x?d = null;d += x;I wrote the question as a result of my surprise that you could do this with delegate types. In other words, you could add things to a null delegate.However, it turns out that it works with other things too, including strings. It seems that a += overload (which is how we g… Read more →

Now doing some stuff on string interning in C#. For some reason I have this picture of a program that gets young people in to work as strings and pays them nothing. However this is not actually how it works..... Read more →

Writing about string stuff. Needed a few lines for an example. Remembered this:"A rocket explorer named WrightOnce travelled much faster than light.He set out one day,In a relative way,And returned on the previous night." Read more →

(Above: The Android, Android Studio, and Java logos. I don't own any of these - nor is this post endorsed by any of the entities represented here - they are just for illustrative purposes.) I've been using Java pretty extensively recently, as I've been doing a module on Android development at University. It's a pretty interesting language, so I thought I'd share my first impressions here. Later on… Read more →

Went to a lovely wedding today. Best of luck to David and Emily. Read more →

How do you call the finalizer in a base class? Read more →