The long-term success of every operating system is tied to the progress of hardware, which has taken a 90-degree turn from "faster every generation" to "more parallel every generation." For the better part of a decade, the chips in new machines have run no faster, but there have been more …

As the sun falls, the seagulls, which have been the only birds I've seen, are joined by some swifts darting into the facade of nearby buildings and a trio of hawks or maybe kites: rather drab, but with that athletic sharp-banked twisting flight.

...

The wide beach has a cold-looking tumbling …

A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dynamite, the most compellingly complete "world" I've read in I-can't-remember. The world is brilliant, a gritty and "realistic" medieval-ish place with slowly-introduced fantastical elements -- summers and winters last for years (and even decades), there were …

On my recent trip to Chile, I used the following iPhone apps:

Word Lens: Realtime translation. You point the iPhone at a sign or menu and you see live video, but the Spanish words are translated into English. It not only provides a "Wow!" experience, it's actually by far the …

The Ice Limit by Douglas Preston

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A fun thriller concerned with the recovery of a meteorite on the frozen islands off Cape Horn. There's a good deal of nonsense: engineering that would take months or years is done in a matter of days (to …

My first in-water shark encounter was in San Diego, in La Jolla Cove. I was snorkeling in the cove, out near “Alligator Rock” when I saw a Gray Smoothhound, an entirely harmless shark maybe 3’ long. But, hey, it’s a shark that looks like a shark and I wanted …

Damon Tucker, probably the Big Island's most prominent blogger, was given a pretty solid roughing-up by Big Island police on Friday night, while videotaping police arresting people after a concert in Pahoa. The photos on Tucker's site clearly indicate that excessive force was used against Tucker, who probably weighs 150 …

Project Daytona: Iterative MapReduce on Windows Azure - Microsoft Research.

::: {style="font-size: 10pt;"} Faithful readers know that I'm learning Scala, somewhat reluctantly. A few weeks ago, I was reading New Scientist magazine and saw this writeup of Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, which mentioned that he was on the review board that studied the crash of the Mars …

Prime numbers are not my thing, but generating them is a common task in the early Project Euler problems. The one algorithm I know for generating primes is the Sieve of Eratosthenes, which I defined in Scala as:

[sourcecode lang="scala"]
def successor(n : Double) : Stream[Double] = Stream.cons(n …