Google Buys Peakstream, Hot Young Player in General Purpose GPU (Concurrent) Programming

Google's interest in concurrent programming is no surprise -- indexing the Web involves a lot of parallelism -- but their \<a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/05/google_buys_peakstream/"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">acquisition of Peakstream, developers of a low-level programming tool, is startling.

To quickly review …

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Book 'Bots Battling Builds Bizarreness?

Have you ever noticed that "Buy This Book Used..." prices from Amazon and the like are often bizarre? Often they're strangely specific -- "\\(43.72" -- and often they're insanely overpriced "Paperback 23rd Printing of Programming with dBase II: \\)1,234.56"

Jeff Duntemann thinks it's due to 'bots. If it's not …

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"Service Unavailable" Woes: It Appears that dasBlog is Spontaneously Restarting

I'm aware that my blog has been troublesome lately (hopefully, your aggregator has borne the pain). I run \<a href="http://www.dasblog.info/"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">dasBlog, which I generally like and in which I have an insane investment (oh, look, I started this blog 5 years …

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IBM's Telelogic Acquisition: Buying Marketshare, Not Expanding Market

I agree with Alan Zeichick's analysis of IBM's acquisition of modeling tool vendor Telelogic:  the overlap with IBM's Rational product line is high, the acquisition "is a bid to buy market share....we've taken a powerful innovator and strong IBM competitor out of the market."

The software development industry typically …

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As A Programmer, Do You Go Into Debug Mode With Bureaucracy?

One of my few talents is that I'm really good dealing with bureaucracies. Not in the long run, where they drive me crazy, but in the short run, when they're telling you that you should buy the ticket and they'll refund it, or that you have to pay your entire …

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Parallel Hard Drives: Maybe I Was Wrong

A while ago, I posted my uninformed thoughts on parallel hard drives. \<a href="http://engagebrain.com/%3fp%3d41"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Charles Lecklider says I'm wrong: that doubling the number of moving parts within a single drive is unlikely to be popular, that a good RAID controller …

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"The Definitive ANTLR Reference" by Terence Parr

I second Andrew Binstock's recommendation of "The Definitive ANTLR Reference" by Terence Parr (author of ANTLR), even to Binstock's sly observation that the book "sort of lulls you into the false belief that you could write a new scripting language fairly easily."

I really like ANTLR. Not long ago, I …

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"xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code" by Gerard Meszaros

My first reaction to the book xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code by Gerard Meszaros (Addison-Wesley) was shock: 800 pages on writing unit tests? Isn't that taking things a little too far?

I have a problem calling such an omnibus a "patterns" book. At 800 pages, xUnit Test Patterns is …

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I know it was you, Paulie. You broke my heart. You broke my heart!

Mark my words.

Update: A "friend" reminds me that I predicted that the end would be Christopher killing Tony. Yeah, so obviously David Chase reads my blog and does things just to make me look stupid. But the ending's in the can, so I'm sticking with my prediction.

P.S …

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Mathematica: The Greatest Programming Tool You've Never Used

If there were 3 tools that I could wish every programmer would develop one complete project in, they would be:

  • jUnit
  • Smalltalk
  • Mathematica

Each will forever change your opinion of what a software development environment ought to be like but each, at the level of an article or a blogpost …

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