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Fast File Loading / part II - Load-In-Place

In my first article on Fast File Loading, I described techniques directly related with the hardware and the Operating System to load files in the most efficient way. In this one, a technique for organizing the data to be loaded as fast as possible is described. Basically, we are going to load data without doing any parsing at all. Although the techniques described here are oriented towards realtime applications, any application could use them to accelerate its load times.

The implementation and all the samples shown here can be found in a project that you can download. It is a project for Microsoft Visual Studio 8.0 and it has been tested under a 32-bit architecture. Extensions to other compilers and other architectures should be easy to add. This code must be taken as a proof of concept and not as a solid and robust implementation ready to be used in a project. I have tried to isolate the dependencies with other systems so that you can concentrate in the topic of this article.

Click to read the full article

Blog Refinements

I have been doing some improvements to my blog. Most of them are internal ones (like upgrading WordPress, updating admin plugins, improving the CSS compatibility, etc) and others are visible ones, like the new About image, the link to my LinkedIn profile and the Blogroll with the blogs I have in my Bloglines account.

By the way, I discovered FeedBurner and started to use it to manage the feeds from this blog. All the requests are redirected now to FeedBurner. You don’t have to change anything to continue reading the feeds. May be some old articles appears as new in your feedreader, but that should be temporal. I have changed the information that appeared in the feeds; now you get only a brief summary of the post and if you want to read it entirely you have to click and visit the page (there is a open debate in internet about this: Full Text vs. Summary Feeds. Well, I changed my politic, but I could return to the full text in the future. I am only experimenting).

And that is all. Tomorrow I promise a more interesting entry.

PD: Thanks, to my bro for creating the caricature. He is the creator of the great comic site TiNoMi.