Windows, NginX, MySQL, and PHP

Introduction

A while back I setup a LEMP server (Linux, NginX, MySQL, and PHP) using Virtual Box. This is fine for testing out how a live server might behave, or even for using as a virtual server if you don't have the dedicated hardware to host a server. However, for a server in active development it's a huge inconvenience as everytime I want to test out a change, no matter how small, I was forced to push the changes to the virtual server. To get around this, I'm going to setup a development server which can run in the Windows environment I normally use. I'm also going to setup the XDebug plugin. This will allow me to debug php code without using the "traditional" console/echo solution. I'm unsure if XDebug would work with my virtual server setup, but I do know it works with this development setup.

msysGit Context Menu Missing Issue Fix

This is a short fix for msysGit's context menus.

Something that's bothered me about the way msysGit context menus work is that they only work when you actually have a directory selected. You can't just click on the Windows Explorer "background" and launch the bash at that location.

The issue was brought up to the msysGit team but they didn't actually make any changes to fix the issue. Whether they haven't done it yet, don't know how, or intend this to be the correct behavior, I don't know. I just know it's not how I want it to be.

I could fix this by using the git-cheetah dll, but I don't really like this because it creates tons of menus I don't really want. It really doesn't fit into the way I use Git.

I use TortoiseGit for simple day-to-day use and the Git Bash when I need to do some heavy lifting. The less items I can have cluttering my already large explorer context menu the better.

SSE2 Vectorization Benchmarking Problem

Introduction

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.