Holly, who recently got me a signed copy of Naked Conversations, blogged about a fun little site she’s thrown together with a friend. The name? goghetto.com. The tagline: “Confess your ghetto ways online.”

Seems like Asian people just love the ghetto. Terry Chay shares some ghetto photos. Looks like there was much ghetto-loving at Simply Lunch 2.0 according to Mark Jen.

These online confessional sites have always been popular … like group hug and PostSecret … but goghetto.com has more bling. How can you not love that? Especially if you’re Asian!?

UPDATE: goghetto.com is up on Digg — go show your support and Digg it.

Tags:
goghetto,
confessions,
funny,
bling,
asian

Sree Kotay blogs about JavaScript a bit. (If you’re interested in more technical details, I’d recommend checking out Simon Willison’s “A (Re)-Introduction to JavaScript” presentation.) In Sree’s blog, he writes:

Part of understanding the distinction, in the trivial case, comes from the (obvious) understanding of basic JS optimization, that:

for (i=0; i<100; i++) a.b.c.d(v);

...is A LOT slower, at least in JavaScript, than:

var f=a.b.c.d;
for (i=0; i<100; i++) f(v);

...because after all, JS is a dynamic language. I'll provide some specific JavaScript performance tips and JavaScript benchmarks to make the points clearly.

Now, I intuitively understand and agree with Sree that the latter should be faster, but exactly how much faster? Are symbol lookups in modern JavaScript engines actually that slow? Don't modern JavaScript interpreters take advantage of JIT bytecode compilation and bytecode optimization, so that if you write the former code, it gets optimized behind the scenes into the latter form? (Whether this is possible through static analysis, I'm not sure of -- I'm just throwing this question out there.)

Supposing it's not possible to optimize away the inefficiency of the first form ... what kind of performance penalty are we talking about? 1%? 10%? Is it a material difference that should drive a best practice around coding convention to avoid it? Out of sheer laziness, I'm only going to benchmark in Firefox 1.5.0.1 here on my 2.2 GHz Dell C840:

<script language="JavaScript">
var v = "Hello, world.";
var a = {
    b: {
        c: {
            d: function(arg) { return arg; }
        }
    }
};

document.write("<p>a.b.c.d(\"Hello, world.\") = " + a.b.c.d("Hello, world.") + "</p>");

var start = new Date();

for (var i = 0; i < 1000000; i++) {
    a.b.c.d(v);
}

var now = new Date();

document.write("<p>Difference: " + (now - start) + "</p>");

start = new Date();

var f = a.b.c.d;
for (var i = 0; i < 1000000; i++) {
    f(v);
}

now = new Date();

document.write("<p>Difference: " + (now - start) + "</p>");
</script>

The output:

a.b.c.d("Hello, world.") = Hello, world.

Difference: 2374

Difference: 1652

Since the JavaScript Date object provides time in milliseconds, we're seeing one million iterations in 2374 milliseconds or 2.4 microseconds per iteration for the first form vs. one million iterations in 1652 milliseconds or 1.7 microseconds for the second form. We're talking a difference of 0.7 microseconds per iteration, or a 29% difference. (Okay, my math skills are really weak, so I could be wrong here. Please double-check my numbers and let me know if I've gotten anything wrong, please.)

Okay, so 29% overhead is nothing to scoff at, but shaving 0.7 microseconds per iteration isn't worth optimizing away when I'm guessing there's lots of other coding practices where much more time is wasted. In other words, 90% of the time spent exeucting a script likely isn't in that 29% of overhead, so it's not where you should be focusing your optimization efforts.

Tags:
javascript,
programming,
optimization

I just love Scott Adams. Recently, he asked, “If you had to design a dating web site that matched people on just two criteria, what would those criteria be?” Call me insensitive, but here’s my answer:

1. Number of natural teeth.
2. Eye color.

A complete set of adult teeth should add up to 32 (including the four wisdom teeth). People with more than 32 … well, that’s a big warning flag, right? People with significantly less … probably live too far south or west for me to be interested in all the way up here in New Jersey. So, tooth count is a good selector, if you ask me.

Eye color is the subtle way of being racist. I mean, how many blue-eyed black people do you know? Years ago, I was told a great story where a racially sensitive parent who was told by their child that “they were dating a South African” wanted to subtly find out if they were black or white, so they asked, “what color are his eyes?” Yeah, smooth, right? Of course, most people probably have brown eyes, but for all the people who don’t, this question is probably a good selector.

So, I’m a 29-toothed brown-eyed looking for a 26-32 toothed blue-eyed. (I’ve had two wisdom teeth removed so far, and one is apparently still hiding in my gums.)