Design on Shivanand Velmurugan — Product leader. Systems thinker.

Unsigned Arithmetic

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Since my last post, I’ve had a couple of replies, a few more tweets, and few minutes of talking about unsigned types in Java, and why it doesn’t support them.

I still retail the view that unsigned types are unnecessary for the majority of Java developers. The only kind that should care, are those who deal with network information (like representing an ipaddress or macaddress). Everyone, put down your forks, and do not touch the unsigned.

Why does Java not support unsigned int? - Part 1

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000

An interesting thing for me, is that if I am active on twitter during daytime in India (now that I’m here on vacation), I get to have some interesting conversations about design and development. Today, I chanced to talk about the lack of unsigned values support in Java.

veechand is there unsigned int in #java support your answers 10 Jul 2010 from TweetDeck

shiva @veechand nope. but use char instead. If you really want a type, you can define your own class backed by char 12 Jul 2010 from Twitter for iPhone in reply to veechand

The devil is in the why?

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I got asked, what the best way to do a join between two large lists, into another list was? I always tend to answer that question with: it depends.

Just like any other algorithm, there is no silver bullet. It is a trade off between CPU and memory utilisation. Sometimes, we do have to think about these things (this is code in c++ on a device with scarce resources, to say the least).

Common Access Portal

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

With advent of web 2.0, and some habits cultivated over the last decade, I have a certain list of tasks that I do everyday. I current visit a bunch of websites more than once a day, and an integrated interface would do me so much good.

mail, a whole set of accounts, gmail, yahoo, etc
feed readers
blog editor
orkut
del.icio
google notebook

What is lacking, is the ability to have a single sign-on/account mgmt capability, a common dashboard, ability to cross-launch/cross-post content.