If you're part of the current blogging craze, then you've likely heard of Blog-City, a blogging site owned and operated by Blog-City Ltd. When some unexpected performance issues cropped up, Java performance experts Jack Shirazi and Kirk Pepperdine(from JavaPerformanceTuning.com) were asked to assist in a technical tuning of Blog-City. Here's what they found out and did to fix the problems.

Fernando has previewed Visual Studio 2005 Codename "Whidbey" Enterprise Developer Edition Alpha. Below is an excerpt: " Visual SourceSafe is a viable solution that lets you effectively manage project files. It tracks and stores changes to a file so that developers can review a file's history, return to earlier versions of the file and develop programs concurrently."

An interview with Hideya Kawahara, the lead developer of Project Looking Glass, about one of Sun's hottest projects, recently open sourced.

This is the first installment of ThinkSecret's "Inside Tiger" series, covering Mac OS X Version 10.4. Today, they begin looking at one of Tiger's most touted features, Spotlight, a new suite of systemwide search tools. Elsewhere, SMH in Australia has a Tiger article. Update: Appleinsider has more Tiger articles with screenshots: 1, 2, 3, 4.

Opera Software released today the version 7.52 of Opera browser with added security (Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and MS-Windows):

One glaring issue I've had since my transition to Linux is video games. Being a Nintendo (consoles) and Sierra (PC) kid, I've gravitated to consoles more lately, but the occasional PC game has kept my interest solidly enough to keep Windows around on a spare drive. I tried WineX (CVS) in the past, and had great success with Diablo II, but didn't bother to try any 'new' games with it.

This article surveys a number of benchmarks and finds that Java performance on numerical code is comparable to that of C++, with hints that Java's relative performance is continuing to improve. Then they describe clear theoretical reasons why these benchmark results should be expected.

Marcel Moolenaar has been very busy with GDB code as of late, having imported gdb version 6.1.1 in late June and now supplying a patch to freebsd-arch@ that adds kernel debugging and helpful features to FreeBSD's gdb and ddb code, including thread awareness. Other interesting additions include optimizations for the 64-bit platforms, compression for remote gdb, and improved symbol handling.

Softly spoken, shy and retiring Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent an email to staff yesterday to complain that the company is not as wealthy as everyone thinks. According to Mr Ballmer, stories have been getting out that he is sitting on a fathomless cash ocean of billions of dollars and does nothing more than swim in the mountains of loot. He wanted to tell staff that it is not true because Microsoft needed a lot of cash.

While corporate users are worried about security holes, they often rely on internal apps and Web sites that only work within Microsoft's dominant browser.

Customers can now purchase workstations using Intel Corp.'s Nocona Xeon processor, with 64-bit extensions to the x86 instruction set, but they can't run the beta 64-bit version of Windows designed for those extensions on the new workstations.

Stephen Walther looks at the new caching features included in ASP.NET 2.0, and how you can use them to improve the performance and scalability of your ASP.NET applications.

In the following article, DistroWatch explores OpenBSD, an operating system built from the ground up with security in mind. Though not suitable for every taste, OpenBSD will no doubt save many system administrators gray hairs. Even for those not running a server, this is a very stable and powerful OS and you don't necessarily need to be paranoid (though it helps) to enjoy using it.

I recently blogged on a disconcerting trend that I see at USENIX, and for OS research more generally.