Month: February 2008
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Multi-threading Memory
As I’ve written before, multi-threaded code is hard to write. It becomes even harder to write when you find that lock contention is an efficiency issue. On a modern multi-core system locks require some sort of memory cache coordination between the various cores. If your program is written using fine-grained locks which may be held…
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Eat Food
I recently read “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan. It’s not as weirdly fascinating as his earlier book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” but it has a lot of interesting information. What I found most interesting was the shift in the recommendations of the McGovern commision on nutrition in 1977. This was the first attempt to…
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Debugging
I think that people who take a computer science degree in college should be required to study debugging. For better or for worse, debugging is an essential part of programming. However, most programmers are left to learn it on their own, in a way that is not true of many other aspects of programming. I…
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Jumper Again
I did go to the movie version of Jumper. It had nothing to do with the book. I think there were about three or four scenes from the book in the movie, all at the very beginning. The characters were all completely different, although they had the same names. In general the movie was pretty…
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Winter
Visiting Maine at this time of year reminds me how winter is the limiting factor for life in the north. Every plant and animal which lives there has a complex and energy intensive survival mechanism for the cold: insulation, hibernation, migration, etc. Where I live now in California the limiting factor is the long, dry,…