Monthly Archives: November 2009

Locking screens on Macs with the keyboard

By Charles Koppelman in Null | November 24, 2009
Desktop security is a big issue when you have access to massive amounts of data. As far as plain old terminal security, locking your computer while you’re away is a pretty basic rule. We have lots of OSes around the office here – Ubuntu, Windows, and OSX. Of those, Ubuntu and Windows natively provide a [...]

When adding more threads makes it all slower

By Dave Copeland in Code | November 16, 2009
I’ve been working on a new feature that requires analysis of each individual’s entire energy-use history. In other words, I have a process that will touch every single bit of data in our database. This should be a rare thing, so if it takes a while, it’s not that big of a deal. My initial [...]