Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!voder!pyramid!athertn!alex From: alex@athertn.Atherton.COM (Alex Leavens) Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st Subject: Re: Trash, Disks, etc. Keywords: Icons Message-ID: <15500@laurel.athertn.Atherton.COM> Date: 19 Dec 89 00:12:04 GMT References: <8724.2587953b@ecs.umass.edu> Reply-To: alex@Atherton.COM (Alex Leavens) Organization: Atherton Technology, Sunnyvale, CA Lines: 24 >I own a copy of PIE (Professional Icon Editor) It's a great program and it does >what was mentioned, but it is awfully slow to boot up with it; especially if >your booting up with floppies. You would have to put a desk accesory and data >file on every disk you wanted to boot up with the new icons. . Thanks. However, you probably have a very early version of the loader--I re-wrote the loader later, to make it a lot faster. First, if you haven't changed your desktop configuration on the boot floppy, then the loading is instantaneous, because I now save out the previously searched-for load address. In addition, if you have changed things, then searching is a _lot_ quicker. I used to use the old 'word-at-a-time' search algorithm; I now use an algorithm from the Computing column in Scientific American. The algorithm measures the offset from the base of the string search pattern, and then sees where the search failed--you can then skip ahead _at least that many bytes_ before checking again. It's a pretty hip algorithm (I can dig up the specific reference if anyone's interested), and it's a whole _lot_ faster than linear searchs, especially for fairly large search patterns on large amounts of memory. -- --alex (TOO) ['My mind is my own'--#6]