2009: Slow Boot

For much of the past week, I've been doing a bunch of accounting stuff. I am incorporating (as "Faster Programmer LLC" ? as in "Faster can mean both higher productivity and higher performance," but actually as in "Faster, Programmer! Code! Code!") and trying to get monetary things (new bank account, credit …

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A Word To Big Island Bloggers

I've been writing this blog since 2002, which I'm fairly sure makes me the graybeard among the Big Island's small blogging family. For what it's worth, I also was a magazine editor for 7 years (and won a few awards). So I'm going to shake my finger at the trio …

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Lance Armstrong Sighting

DSC_1737

Look who's getting in shape on the Big Island of Hawai'i! Kick ass?

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ResolverOne: Best Spreadsheet Wins $17K

ResolverOne is one of my favorite applications in the past few years. It's a spreadsheet powered by IronPython. Spreadsheets are among the most powerful intellectual tools ever developed: if you can solve your problem with a spreadsheet, a spreadsheet is probably the fastest way to solve it. Yet there are …

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Inference for .NET: Another Option for Python-Based Inference

Inference for .NET is an alternative to Infer.NET & IronPython.

Bonus: Inference for .NET integrates with ResolverOne.

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IronPython 2.0 & Microsoft Research Infer.NET 2.2

 import sys import clr sys.path.append("c:\\program files\\Microsoft Research\\Infer.NET 2.2\\bin\\debug") clr.AddReferenceToFile("Infer.Compiler.dll") clr.AddReferenceToFile("Infer.Runtime.dll") from MicrosoftResearch.Infer import * from MicrosoftResearch.Infer.Models import * from MicrosoftResearch.Infer.Distributions import *  firstCoin = Variable[bool].Bernoulli(0.5) secondCoin = Variable …
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Cascaval et al.'s skepticism on transaction memory

Alexa Weber-Morales of Parallelaware asked me my views on "Software Transactional Memory: Why Is It Only A Research Toy?" given my recent column predicting that the stars are aligning for STM as the model of choice for the manycore era. (Incidentally, if they ever bring back Schoolhouse Rock, my suggested …

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This Glamorous Life of Ours

The glamorous life of a software engineering consultant, Pt. 1

Larry O'Brien says: (7:46:07 AM)

I see you're pushing testing and *scribble* out of 1.3.

Client says: (7:46:23 AM)

we need to move forward

Larry O'Brien says: (7:46:26 AM)

Well.... Not really....

Client …

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Risk factors rewritten as standard practices: twice the fun

Sez Who? has taken the offshore risk profile and rewritten them as recommendations. Sadly, his piece is apparently in use at more companies than mine. >

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Risk Factors for Offshore-Outsourced Development Projects

The June 2008 CACM contains the article "A Risk Profile of Offshore-Outsourced Development Projects"

Since this is a common profile, I thought I'd reproduce the Top 10 Risks. Some of these are universal across all project profiles ("Lack of top management commitment"), but others are definitely more problematic for offshored …

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