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Sleep, Lord's Prayer, Now and the Future

I'm writing some posts about my journey as a new Christian.  Currently I'm very much in the low foothills of faith. I pray these posts may help someone. Woke up early, again. Hey ho. Nowadays, when I remember, I turn to the Lord; sometimes I pray for my Christian brothers and sisters, my family, those I know in need. Woo, get me. Usually I do some breathing exercises whilst repeating The Lord's Prayer. Often this settles my mind and I wake later having dropped off. Nice. Not always and this morning I didn't drop off but Praise the Lord I felt enough oomph to pull myself from my bed to write this blog. I follow Jesus. I still don't know (or do I?) what this really means and I often feel a fraud, squinting at myself like "you do? are you sure? what does THAT even mean?", but a year or so back I "made the decision" to become a Christian as I just couldn't work it all out for myself. I gave in. All the efforts with full-on psycho-analysis, mindfu
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Project Valhalla Space-Time Continuum

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Project Valhalla Space-Time Continuum Background Currently, for all its talents, Java at the lowest level cannot be as efficient in space and time measurements as a language such as C or C++ due to the simple fact it can only use object references and not linearize objects. This significantly affects applications with large data-sets where the overhead of object headers and references adds up. Project Valhalla will enable far more efficient storage (space) and processing (time) of large data-sets with the introduction of value-types . For example, an array of 10M `PricePoint` objects (each of which has two 64-bit primitive fields) will take 320MB in Java but only 160MB in C++ (these numbers will be justified below). Furthermore processing every object in that array will likely cause many, many CPU cache misses with all the resultant slow down as main-memory is accessed to load the references. Disclaimers I hope to demonstrate equivalent Java and C++ code and
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A Bit of Background

About Me and My Views on Software Development Welcome to my blog in which I express my opinions on software development which has been my career, man-and-boy. What's in this post? Who I am What I believe in Who Am I? My name is David Kerr, located in the London area with 20+ years experience in developing software in a diverse range of industries, including defence, medical, telecoms, finance and latterly managed print services. I started off programming Basic (woot!) and assembler on Commodore 64 's, breaking game loaders, writing games and mucking about with external hardware. Since then I've programmed in Pascal, C and C++. I currently develop in Java though I'm learning Scala and Dart at the moment. What do I Believe in? Focussing on my software development beliefs, a short summary is: - General Development Beliefs There are no absolutes in development. Period. There are always caveats and alternatives. I am not interested in wa
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