This is the thirteenth post in an article series about MIT’s lecture course “Introduction to Algorithms.” In this post I will review lectures twenty and twenty-one on parallel algorithms. These lectures cover the basics of multithreaded programming and multithreaded algorithms. Lec...

Your friendly neighborhood admin is back again with another Windows tool to help you tame your computer. I shared with you my favorite application for tweaking the Windows Registry (safely) with WinSecret and how to use SteadyState to keep your machine the way you like it even after letting others m...

It’s time for another poll. Today we want to ask you about disk defrag tools. What program do you use to defragment your hard drive? Anyone who’s owned a Windows PC for a long time will probably agree that eventually you have to defrag the hard drive. As you move files around and keep in...

Summer starts today. It’s the longest day of the year and it’s not too late for some last minute spring cleaning. Of course keeping your system clear of junk is always a good idea. However, here’s a quick six step guide to unclutter your system, increase its performance and speed i...

I think we can all agree on the fact that the Adobe Reader is bloated if you only use it for opening PDF documents. It comes with so many plugins that the loading time is sometimes longer than the reading time of the document that you opened. I have been using a software called Adobe Reader Speedup ...

I just read Tomas' blog entry titled Is footprint still important for embedded devices? His answer is a clear "Yes." Well, what about desktop applications? Why the heck are desktop applications so slow and memory-hungry? Like Tomas, I bought my first computer in the late Seventies. I did a vacation ...