This is the second part of my overview of how I implemented the Useful Resources page. This part focuses on the HTML and Javascript portions.
I'm using JQuery to animate the collapsible menus, as well as perform various selection and event handling tasks.
So I'm going to go over some of how I implemented my Useful Resources page. This time I'm going to focus on the editing portion. This is how I add/remove/modify the structure of links and categories. I use an XML file for this. XML is a great way to represent hierarchical data, and is very easy to modify. I have a MySQL database which keeps track of shared data, for example if I want to use a sub-category's information multiple times. This is mainly done so I don't have to write the description multiple times if I happen to have say a Java sub-category in the Documentations and Manuals section as well as the User Groups section. I won't discuss too much about the MySQL portion this time.
Recently I was doing some testing into SSE2 vectorization. I was curious as to how it worked syntactically and what kind of performance I can expect.
SSE2 works by providing SIMD operations. This allows a single operation to manipulate lots of data. In the case of SSE2, we can utilize 128-bit registers which can process 4 single-precision floating point numbers at a time. At best in theory this gives a 4x speedup. However, there are other factors such as loading data into the registers and storing out the results which means in practice sse2 vectorization will provide less than 4x speedup.
My initial tests were producing strange results, though. I was getting some speedups pushing 5x and higher. So let's investigate what's going on.
I recently found a plugin for Eclipse which allows me to create NSIS installers for Windows. It's called EclipseNSIS, and so far I've found it quite useful.
To test it out I created a simple installer which would install a registered COM DLL file.
