_{Jamie Balfour's}Personal blog

As I'm sure anyone who read my blog for technology related stuff will know, Moore's Law is a fundamental 'law' that defines that the speed of computers will double every two years. It's not entirely the case but it holds true for the majority of systems produced.

The law is more of a theory of a computer scientist called Gordon Moore, one of the founders of what is now Intel. It was theorised in 1965 and what it really stated was that the number of transistors that can be crammed in to one integrated circuit will double every two years. 

Intel call this a tick in their 'tick-tock' cycle. Examples of Intel CPUs include the Sandy Bridge range (tick) when compared with the Ivy Bridge range (tock). Both of these ranges were based on the Sandy Bridge architecture. The Haswell architecture which was the next tick could fit twice as many transistors in the same size of integrated circuit, following Moore's Law. 

But on the release of Broadwell, which was based on the Haswell micro-architecture and was the successor 22nm Haswell, we have arrived at transistors that are only 14nm in size, compared with Haswell's 22nm transistors this change is huge. The next step after 22nm according to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors will come in at 10nm. Currently, Skylake, which is the current range of Intel APUs and is a tick in the tick tock cycle, is facing several problems with going further. For the very first time in the history of Intel's tick-tock cycle, there are going to be two ticks (tick-tick-tock). Why you may ask?

The answer is that Moore's Law no longer holds true with current fabrication techniques. In fact 10nm is posing such problems that it has been delayed until 2017. Cannonlake (formely Skymont), which will be the tock in the cycle will succeed the successor of Skylake, codenamed Kaby Lake. It will drop the size to 10nm. From here on however, there is considerable worry about whether or not we can go any further. We may see for a few years that computers cannot get any more powerful. What worries me is that the companies may use this to make money out of us at no extra cost to them (since the technology will change but the systems will be no more powerful).

So what's the next step then? Quantum computing? Chemical based computing? Biological computing? Good question. 

For the foreseeable future I would imagine that quantum computers will be the future, since they currently already exist. What worries me about the future is how will devices we currently use (such as the world wide Internet) interface with these new devices? I worry greatly about this and how the transition will turn out.

Back in the day, when Netscape and Microsoft started the First Browser War, Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator fought to become the most popular browser. 

Ultimately, to many people's dislike Internet Explorer won and Netscape disappeared. Netscape Communicator evolved into Firefox. At this time Internet Explorer's share of the browser market kept growing, largely due to the fact that it was bundled with Windows until the EU decided to make it compulsory for Microsoft to include a way for users to change to other browsers easily.

Since then, I have become a web developer, and I stopped using Internet Explorer again in favour of Firefox and eventually Safari. I'm not the only one who stopped using Internet Explorer, however. Year after year the share for Internet Explorer has dropped. Here are the statistics that show this for November 2015 from W3 Schools:

And here is a set of statistics from 2002, 13 years ago (when I used Netscape I'll have you know!)

But why is this the case?

Microsoft just didn't care

Microsoft was very bad at developing Internet Explorer between iterations, they thought because they had a huge market share that they wouldn't lose it. I only realised this after becoming a web developer myself, since developing for Internet Explorer all the way up to IE9 is very difficult.

Even if other browsers had features for a year or two, Internet Explorer would most likely not get these features for a long time after. Prefixed support wasn't even there. Microsoft, as always, just thought it was ok to just leave it. 

Microsoft only cared when Internet Explorer started to disappear.

The future

Microsoft will have a lot of catching up to do with Microsoft Edge since Internet Explorer got them the bad name of the browsers. I personally do not see this happening in a way that will transform the share so that Microsoft has the upper edge again, but I can see them regaining some of the lost ground with it.

Edge is a fantastic browser, especially from Microsoft. Edge really does support cutting-edge technologies and implements most of the web standards well.

I'm afraid I had no real choice but since the information architecture on my website has changed significantly, I've had to remove all comments relating to the old architecture. 

A significant number of comments were on articles and reviews and unfortunately have had to be removed.

Since I first used Python back in 2012, I've come a long way. It was never my intention for Python to become another of the languages I know since I feel that I know enough languages as it is. Still, naturally, one of my university courses had to disagree with this and stick it in.

So I learned Python, all in the space of about 24 hours because the Python I learned before has been completely changed (other than one or two small things like the def: and the stupid lack of braces).

I've really come to dislike Python as a language though, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. 

I believe the Python syntax is the worst syntax I've ever seen.

I mean the lack of braces and semi-colons (;) means that there are no line terminators and no nice structures generated by braces or even as shown in ZL a for is opened by the word for optionally followed by a { and terminated by either an end for or a }

I like the way Python encourages indentation, but I hate this being an absolute requirement. 

Python seems very ugly throughout; the use of the colon (:) before the body of a construct seems horrible. And the lack of the required brackets around a condition is even more horrid.

Another really awful discovery I made when messing about with Python is the fact that lambda functions can only be single-lined. I mean what? Even after 24 years of development (as old as I am!), this is still the case whereas in my 7-month-old ZL language lambda functions have no limit to their length. This is an absolute disgrace for any modern-day language as I see anonymous functions as one of the building blocks of ZL.

But perhaps the worst bit is the way that we declare things in Python. Since there is absolutely no need to specify a type variables need only be written as the name of the variable followed by an equal sign and then the value. Other weakly typed languages like PHP, JavaScript, my own ZL and so on have nicer ways of doing this like with PHP and ZL putting a $ sign in front of the name represents a variable. This makes it easier to distinguish variables. In JavaScript, variables are declared after a var keyword.

Since I started to write my own programming language, ZL, I have become more of a snob towards languages that are, in my eyes at least, ugly. Python is my absolute least favourite while PHP comes up number one for inconsistencies (although it is improving, and it is still a better solution in my eyes than any other server-side language).

Python swiftly moved to my least favourite language just this month.

I mean, a language is a language and if you like it that's great, and my opinion is just an opinion and all I'm saying here is how I dislike certain things about Python. I'm interested in your opinions on this too by the way.

I'm very happy to say that a big update has just been finished in relation to my website. I had been flattening some elements of my website and since becoming a far more competent designer, I very recently came up with an idea. 

In 2014, I started to building styles that unintentionally left my website with no singular style, towards a much more gradient-based website. Early this year I pushed this further and my site was full of gradients and so on. Gradients are nice and everything, but they make things difficult when you want a consistent style. 

Today and yesterday, I began to work on a new interface, known as 'Silver Orange' since the colours of choice and grays and oranges (there are very few other colours in the range). 

Allow me to show you some examples.

The conclusion box before

The conclusion box after

The above images show the conclusion box on my website. You can find this in articles and reviews. It's new look removes gradients and flattens the interface by removing curved borders and box shadows.

Epic Form was the name of my forms. This is an example of a button.

The new buttons on my website are flatter and less curved.

The buttons are obviously more flat than they were before and the same goes for the whole form input design. I've also dropped the name Epic Form which has been in use since 2013.

The original bibliography.

The new bibliography.

The new bibliography fits in better with the new design

As well as flattening the interface of gradients, a lot of curved borders that have existed for the last few years have been removed and replaced with nice borders.

Finally, I have made my colour scheme far more obvious and consistent. You should notice this pretty much immediately.

So there you have it, the latest update to my website.

I have recently changed from Source Sans Pro to Open Sans again as the font on my website.

I noticed more and more than it becomes increasingly difficult to read the text at smaller font sizes with Source Sans Pro and received a comment about this yesterday. I have since switched back to the font I used right up until July this year for quite some time. Since going back to this font, just today, I will say that the text is far more legible. 

This is just a post of a link to an article by the Guardian. This article is fairly interesting and look at an interesting concept that computer scientists and mathematicians come across all the time - proving by disproving.

You can find the article here.

In just under one hour, the desktop version of my website will change to the Christmas theme for everyone! Since this is only the second year of me doing this, 2014 being the first, I am hoping to see the changes I have made over the last year to make the system flawless in action. 

Since I am an Edinburger I thought it was important to post a link to mark this moment, the moment Tim Cook visited the Edinburgh Apple Store for the first time! How I'd have loved to have been in the store at the time.

The Scotsman has more here.

So I was somewhat disappointed by the latest Nintendo Direct, but two things stood out.

I particularly liked the re-releases of Pokemon Red, Blue and Yellow and the HD remake of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, which just so happens to be my favourite console game ever. I was also taken in by the trailers for the new Xenoblade and Starfox games.

I was also obviously interested in the Smash Bros content that is to be released but was slightly disappointed to see Final Fantasy becoming a part of Smash Bros. Nonetheless, any new content for the game is always good (but more money that needs to be spent, sadly).