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This Blog Has Moved!

Right, so yes, five years ago I moved to github pages, and never bothered to redirect any of these pages there. Now I've moved on from there, and... Finally I am using my real domain, trishagee.com . My blog is now at trishagee.com/blog .  See you there!
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In my day...

Web development has changed a lot . I was aware that there have been many changes in the last few years, and I’ve seen maturity come to web platforms in the form of standardisation and common reusable libraries and frameworks - and I don’t mean reusable in the way we used to “reuse” stuff by nicking it off other people’s websites when we saw something cool. I used to be a web developer.  Sort of.  Some times I’ve been on the bleeding edge, and others… I remember using JavaScript to call back-end services with an XML payload before people were using the term AJAX, but I also remember working on an enterprise um… “classic”… JSP application only “recently” - in fact that was probably the last job where I did anything that looked like web development. So this blog post is going to chart the progress of web development through my own experience.  Of course, this doesn’t by any means cover the whole spectrum, but I think my experience has been not unusual for...
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CSS for Developers: Horizontal and Vertical Centring

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First, an apology.  I will be using the British spelling for "centre", because, well, I'm British.  But it gets really confusing because you have to use the American spelling in the code.  And doesn't "Centring" just look wrong? Part Five: Horizontal and Vertical Centring One of the most common things you want to do with blocks of content is to centre it.  In particular, you would think that vertically centring content would be straightforward, but it turns out that in HTML/CSS it just isn't. 5.1 Horizontal Centring Centring a paragraph of text is clearly easy - all you need is text-align: center .  However, sometimes you want to centre a block, something like a div, without having all the text centred as well.  This is slightly trickier than you might expect, because the only CSS attributes you have are for centring text. <html> <head> <title>Horizontal Centering</title> <style type="text/css"> ...
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CSS for Developers: Cross Browser Table Border Behaviour

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One of the aims of this series is to highlight some stupid gotchas in support for CSS in the different browsers. Today's gotcha is table borders. Yes, yes, I said don't use tables.  What I means is, don't use tables for layout. But you can use tables for, you know, tabular data.  Like, for examples, lists of instruments and their bid and ask prices . But you should know that even when you use strict mode, Internet Explorer has slightly... eccentric... rendering behaviour for tables.  Actually to be specific, it's IE7 only. <html> <head> <title>Table Borders</title> <style type="text/css"> table, td { border: 1px solid black; } td { height: 20px; min-width: 5px; } </style> </head> <body> <table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr> <td>first cell</td> <td>se...
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CSS for Developers: Column Layout Using CSS

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This is a continuation of my series of CSS hints / tips / cheats for developers (and other technical-but-not-UI people). The screenshots are in Chrome on a Mac.  The originals were on Firefox on Ubuntu so I can tell you the behaviour is identical. Part Three: Column Layout Using CSS (or: still no excuse to use tables) Today's example is a simple one, but worth knowing all the same.  The aim is, once again, not to use HTML tables to provide any sort of layout.  In most cases not only does using a div reduce the size of your DOM (and potentially help improve the performance of your page ), it's actually a lot less complicated to organise your layout this way. 3.1 Display Elements or Text in Columns <html> <head> <title>Column layout</title> <style type="text/css"> #col1 { background-color: yellow; /**have to know the width **/ width: 30%; float: left; } #...
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CSS for Developers: The Joy of Floats

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As promised, the Long Awaited Follow-Up to CSS for Developers Part One ! Well, long-awaited if you're as afflicted with NADD as I am. Quick recap - the aim of this series is to provide a quick and easy how-to around the magic that is CSS.  It's primarily aimed at developers, although I would hope it's comprehensible to a range of tech-savvy people. (Note: unless otherwise stated, the screenshots are in Chrome on a Mac - given an earlier version of this guide I can tell you the behaviour is identical to Firefox on Ubuntu). Part Two: The Joy of Floats (or: why they don't do what you think they should) Last time I stated that using float is a great way to position elements contained in a div.  Well, it has its downsides too.  Quite a few actually. So this post documents the ones I ran into and what we did on the  LMAX Trader UI  to get it to look the way we wanted. Disclaimer: There might be better ways to do a lot of this stuff - if you locate them via...
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CSS for Developers: Horizontal Layout Using CSS

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I'm a Java Developer.  But I'm also a Web Developer.  Web Developers have been so badly maligned over the last decade or so that I always feel wary (and sometimes slightly ashamed) admitting this.  There's some sort of assumption that Web Developers (and Front End Developers) aren't real programmers. Similarly, "real" developers don't like to be tainted by coming into contact with that nasty "front end stuff" in case someone mistakes them for a designer. Trust me, no-one is going to mistake a Java Developer for a designer.  For a start, when designers wear geeky glasses it's ironic.  Or chic.  Or something. But developers will be forced to do something around the front end at some point in their lives.  Even if it's because they're sick of manually kicking off some process and want to give the users a big red button to press instead. So, as much to compensate for my own goldfish-like brain as anything else, I'm going to make a...
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Dissecting the Disruptor: Writing to the ring buffer

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This is the missing piece in the end-to-end view of the Disruptor.  Brace yourselves, it's quite long.  But I decided to keep it in a single blog so you could have the context in one place. The important areas are: not wrapping the ring; informing the consumers; batching for producers; and how multiple producers work. ProducerBarriers The Disruptor code has interfaces and helper classes for the Consumer s, but there's no interface for your producer, the thing that writes to the ring buffer.  That's because nothing else needs to access your producer, only you need to know about it.  However, like the consuming side, a ProducerBarrier is created by the ring buffer and your producer will use this to write to it. Writing to the ring buffer involves a two-phase commit.  First, your producer has to claim the next slot on the buffer.  Then, when the producer has finished writing to the slot, it will call commit on the ProducerBarrier . So let's look at...
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Dissecting the Disruptor: What's so special about a ring buffer?

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Recently we open sourced the LMAX Disruptor , the key to what makes our exchange so fast.  Why did we open source it?  Well, we've realised that conventional wisdom around high performance programming is... a bit wrong. We've come up with a better, faster way to share data between threads, and it would be selfish not to share it with the world.  Plus it makes us look dead clever. On the site you can download a technical article explaining what the Disruptor is and why it's so clever and fast.  I even get a writing credit on it, which is gratifying when all I really did is insert commas and re-phrase sentences I didn't understand. However I find the whole thing a bit much to digest all at once, so I'm going to explain it in smaller pieces, as suits my  NADD audience. First up - the ring buffer.  Initially I was under the impression the Disruptor was just the ring buffer.  But I've come to realise that while this data structure is at the hea...
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Dissecting the Disruptor: Demystifying Memory Barriers

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My recent slow-down in posting is because I've been trying to write a post explaining memory barriers and their applicability in the Disruptor . The problem is, no matter how much I read and no matter how many times I ask the ever-patient Martin and Mike questions trying to clarify some point, I just don't intuitively grasp the subject. I guess I don't have the deep background knowledge required to fully understand. So, rather than make an idiot of myself trying to explain something I don't really get, I'm going to try and cover, at an abstract / massive-simplification level, what I do understand in the area.  Martin has written a post  going into memory barriers  in some detail, so hopefully I can get away with skimming the subject. Disclaimer: any errors in the explanation are completely my own, and no reflection on the implementation of the Disruptor or on the LMAX guys who actually do know about this stuff. What's the point? My main aim in this s...
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