Santa Anas Gone!

The chart at right shows the temperature (red line) and relative humidity (green line) at our home for the past week. You can see a three-day period with low relative humidity, starting just before midnight on the 4th and ending around 5 pm on the 7th. That's one signature of a Santa Ana condition; the other is the wind speed and direction. This time, for whatever reason, the winds never really picked up to high speeds, and only intermittently shifted direction.

Yesterday (the 8th) afternoon the humidity increased dramatically while the temperature decreased, and this morning it felt downright chilly this morning (to the heat-acclimated amongst us; you residents of northern climates can stop laughing now). A welcome break, indeed.

Unfortunately our one-week forecast says it will be hot again by the end of the coming week, well into the 90s...

Java Performance

IBM on the "Java urban legend" of poor performance:

Pop quiz: Which language boasts faster raw allocation performance, the Java language, or C/C++? The answer may surprise you — allocation in modern JVMs is far faster than the best performing malloc implementations. The common code path for new Object() in HotSpot 1.4.2 and later is approximately 10 machine instructions (data provided by Sun; see Resources), whereas the best performing malloc implementations in C require on average between 60 and 100 instructions per call. And allocation performance is not a trivial component of overall performance — benchmarks show that many real-world C and C++ programs, such as Perl and Ghostscript, spend 20 to 30 percent of their total execution time in malloc and free — far more than the allocation and garbage collection overhead of a healthy Java application.

The article also has a bunch of interesting links...