Category: Kev’s Blog

PC running hot? Now this is a solution you need.

http://www.peteredge.orcon.net.nz/casepics.htm

Prevayler has caught my interest for a while now as I have been working with Hibernate now for about a year and a half.

Prevayler is a memory resident, file based persistence engine. The objects are kept in memory, and are persisted o disk for permanent storage.

OnJava have an article on their site on using Prevayler. Is it suitable for enterprise systems? No probably not, but looks interesting for small systems or for prototyping simple systems.

Apple have annouced they are moving away from using IBM’s PowerPC processors, and will begin supporting Intel CPUs, as early as 2006.

This is a major harware shift for Apple, but the reasons being stated are that IBM is not keeping up with Apple’s demand for low-power, faster PowerPC processors, especially for the PowerBook notebooks (there still is not a G5 based PowerBook).

Mac OS X has reportedly been developed with two codelines, one PowerPC based and the other, until now unannounced, for Intel based CPUs.

The switch may bring down the price of Macs across the board, but they won’t be able to boast the performance advantage, GHz vs GHz, as they have done in comparison with PowerPC vs Intel chips in the past.

This move also puts an end to any speculation that the IBM/Sony/Toshiba jointly developed PowerPC based ‘Cell’ processor (for the Playstation 3), with multiple processing cores, will ever make it to the Mac.

Artima.com have a great interview on their site with Erich Gamma, one of the authors of the ‘Gang of Four’ (GoF) Design Patterns book, and creator of JUnit (along with Kent Beck).

In the interview (part 2 of 3), Gamma talks about resusability and flexibility, together with the use of frameworks and toolkits.