August 2008 Archives

Seth Godin - More vs. enough.

Great thought to start the day.

Great reminder: The Null Pattern is a Good Thing.

Well worth a read for anyone interested in time-management: The Trickle List.

Tiny Types - Going overboard with classes? I don't think so. The real problem is that it's ways to expensive to add a new class to the system in C++.

How do we make it cheaper?

A Smalltalk implementation which is explicitely targeted towards embedding in other applications: Smalltalk YX. Sounds great.

(Via James Robertson).

Seth Godin: The secret of the web: Patience.

I wonder if this is the secret of the web or something bigger (software development, success, ...). You name it.

TechCrunch: iPhone Apps: One Month And 60 Million Downloads Later. But Not One Of Them Is A Killer App.

If an application is 99 cent, it doesn't matter if it's a killer app.

A hamburger is 99 cent, too. It disappears in a few seconds. Why wonder about applications which are 99 cent? If I'm using the application for more than 60 seconds, it's a great deal. If I'm using them for a few minutes, it's a fantastic deal. That's way longer than it takes to wolf down the hamburger. I may even have fun using the application. Plus it's way healthier...

So, why bother?

...by Herb Sutter in Dr. Dobbs Journal. If you're into C++, Herb's blog is a must-read. Plus, check out the feeds available at Dr. Dobbs Journal:

• The Pillars of Concurrency (Aug 2007)
• How Much Scalability Do You Have or Need? (Sep 2007)
• Use Critical Sections (Preferably Locks) to Eliminate Races (Oct 2007)
• Apply Critical Sections Consistently (Nov 2007)
• Avoid Calling Unknown Code While Inside a Critical Section (Dec 2007)
• Use Lock Hierarchies to Avoid Deadlock (Jan 2008)
• Break Amdahl's Law! (Feb 2008)
• Going Superlinear (Mar 2008)
• Super Linearity and the Bigger Machine (Apr 2008)
• Interrupt Politely (May 2008)
• Maximize Locality, Minimize Contention (Jun 2008)
• Choose Concurrency-Friendly Data Structures (Jul 2008)
• The Many Faces of Deadlock (Aug 2008)
• Lock-Free Code: A False Sense of Security (Sep 2008)
• Writing Lock-Free Code: A Corrected Queue (Oct 2008)
• Writing a Generalized Concurrent Queue (Nov 2008)
• Understanding Parallel Performance (Dec 2008)
• Measuring Parallel Performance: Optimizing a Concurrent Queue (Jan 2009)
• volatile vs. volatile (Feb 2009)
• Sharing Is the Root of All Contention (Mar 2009)
• Use Threads Correctly = Isolation + Asynchronous Messages (Apr 2009)
• Use Thread Pools Correctly: Keep Tasks Short and Nonblocking (Apr 2009)
• Eliminate False Sharing (May 2009)

[Updated 5/22/09 with the latest list of articles]

...for Real Programmers:

pagetable.com - Deals with such topics as the 6502 illegal opcodes etc.