_{Jamie Balfour's}Personal blog

I was talking with a friend the other day there about the topic of limiting the frames per second (FPS) in a video game when playing on your PC. The argument didn't end with a much clearer understanding than was originally the case and neither side won the argument. 

Many people do not realise how important limiting the FPS in a video game can be for performance. Think about it this way, every piece of information a computer's graphics card needs to produce is more work for the computer. 

If a computer monitor refreshes at 60Hz (around about 60 frames per second) then running 120 frames means that 60 of those frames are wasted. This is, technically, how V-sync works as well. Limiting the FPS allows the GPU to work on the next few frames without filling the GPU doing overtime. 

What this means is that your computer, which could be doing other things like calculating positions of units in a game or something, cannot be done until those frames have rendered. This is wasted CPU and GPU resources.

So go on, try limiting your frames per second.

Long story short, this has been a detrimental year for Intel and a colossal win for AMD. For myself, however, the story isn't as simple as one or the other. My first AMD machine was a Turion 64 X2 back in April 2007. The machine itself was fine, it got a little toasty from time to time and it certainly couldn't play many games of its time and it eventually broke down three years after purchase. AMD had let me down. 

But way back in 2005, I was always very skeptical of the performance of my beast (but only in physical size) of a laptop that was supposedly a desktop replacement when compared with the AMD powered version. The Athlon XP and Athlon 64 versions often outperformed the Pentium 4 version and although AMD CPUs were perhaps better than Intel's at that time, AMD didn't have the market. 

Things got doom and gloom in 2010 onwards for AMD. AMD had definitely lost grip of the market. But as my blog followers will have noticed, I now keep banging on about AMD Ryzen and how it's the current reigning champion in the CPU market, with Intel struggling to keep up.

So where am I, a long-term Intel fan who has finally switched to AMD for the first time in over a decade?

I would say that I am on the boundary edge of switching to AMD for my other computers. Every innovation that they add to their chips such as the recent PCI-E Gen 4 makes me want to stay with AMD more. Performance on my PC is much higher than before, especially saying as I paid less than I have ever done for my PC this time around. 

However. AMD's lack of Thunderbolt, particularly in the laptop segment, means that I cannot connect some of the peripherals that I own to my computer. Uh oh.

So what do you think? Team Red or Blue?

After having integrated push notifications into my website way back in early 2016, I'm now removing them from my website altogether. I think we can also agree, push notifications are quite an annoying thing these days and I've decided to remove them from my website - I never sent any for a while anyway.

From now on, the only push notifications that anyone will receive are from my blog. I intend to have an option to subscribe to these somewhere on my websites.

Dash was my main project for a long time, so developing content management systems is not something I have ever had any problems working on, and in fact, they are one of my favourite things to develop. 

But now, something new, somewhat inspired by Dash, is about to hopefully become a big success. I'm working on a new major project that I started just this evening and it's set to be my biggest project yet. 

Dash 2.0 will rebuild my four-year-in-development project from the ground up, with more focus on object-orientation. 

As a web developer myself, I have been through a bunch of editors trying to find the right one and for the last few years, at least the editor of choice to me has been set. 

Back in 2016, a friend at the time suggested that I use a different editor. I found that, at least for web development, Atom has been the editor of choice. I say this for many reasons.

The first is cross-platform. Whilst I was originally a Visual Studio user when I moved to Mac OS and Linux machines as my main computers, Visual Studio wasn't cross-platform. This meant I needed to do something different when I switched computers to allow me to edit on both machines.

The second is the number of packages available for it. I use a terminal package that allows me to have an in-built command line at the same time as editing. I use an FTP package to allow me to upload in real-time. 

I stand by Atom being my favourite, but it's a difficult call. Visual Studio Code is a definite close second for me, and over the years since I first used both it and Atom, it's got a heck of a lot better. 

According to jscharting.com's blog, 95% of web developers asked in a survey actually use either Visual Studio Code, Atom, Sublime, WebStorm, or VIM as their editor, meaning a huge number of people will be using either of those editors. 

Chrome 76 is a big update. That is in my eyes it is. That's because it adds several new features that benefit a huge number of things on my own website and finally, dark mode is coming to Chrome just like Edge, Safari and Firefox. 

Another major feature coming to Chrome is that of background-filter: blur which allows the glass kind of effect from Windows Aero to come to the web - use cases for this kind of feature are quite limited in flat design but can be used when displaying a box above another, adding a bit of blur to the background helps make it more readable, sidebars that float over can definitely benefit from this feature and much more.

I use both features on my website for different purposes - but they are trivial and have fallback solutions so that older browsers do not miss out.

So in 9 days, according to the Platform Status page, Chrome 76 will launch and I hope that everyone gets their hands on it as soon as possible.

I was extremely pleased to see Alan Turing being put on the UK's new £50 note. What's more impressive, however, is the attention to detail in this note.

You see the binary string that is on the note that reads 1010111111110010110011000 actually converts to the binary number 23061912 which, believe it or not, is the date Alan Turing was born - 23rd of June 1912.

I found this out from a friend who sent me the following Tweet: