James Robertson is producing a series of screencasts providing a Smalltalk overview. I highly recommend taking a look if you are not familiar with Smalltalk. You've undoubtedly heard of Smalltalk and perhaps have seem some Smalltalk syntax, but if you've not seen the Smalltalk development environment in use, you might …

Here's some interesting reading on the challenges of and possible strategies for dealing with exceptions in concurrent versions of C++. The try...catch...finally model of exception handling introduces its own control flow. How will that interact with concurrent models in which you're passing around a "future" (essentially, an IOU …

I've been writing a series of articles for DevX on concurrent programming. The final installment was supposed to be "Multicore for multimedia." Plan A was to speed up the MAD (MPEG Audio Decoder) processing library using OpenMP. That went well enough except for the fact that the code was so …

Intel's announcement of a laser-based chip is frickin' cool and, at the practical level, may be a big deal (beats me). But one thing that blows my mind every time I think about it is that light can only travel \~11.8 inches in a billionth of a second. And …

One of the things that differentiates me from many of my analyst colleagues is that I don't generally delve into business stuff: I'm a technology guy. So normal boardroom shenanigans and so forth aren't "my beat." So let me see if I have this straight: the chairwoman of HP hired …

Patrick Logan refers to Ted Leung observing that quad-core and octo-core MacPros don't show anything like linear speedup. This accords with my own fanaticism about the manycore future. A question I don't know the answer to: Do the CLR & JVM have characteristics that dramatically help or dramatically hinder their suitability …

I'm not sure that I'd feel comfortable carrying a fan rotating at 20,000 revolutions per second in my cellphone, which I keep in my pocket, which is next to my...

The thing produces 10 watts. I don't know if I'm just being paranoid about wondering how it might fail …

The Made In Express contest is over, with the winner being an "All Terrain Self-Maneuverable Robot." This is unfair for at least two reasons:

1. It's a group entry ("Group entries will not be accepted"), and
2. It's been under development for years

I downloaded the source to the robot and the …

Tina and I dove this area of Irian Jaya years ago. It was beautiful and very wild. We didn't see any fin-walking horn sharks, though. (We did see a species of stonefish that is classified as deadly and the locals were like: "Oh, if you get stung, you chew that …

I'm hiring.