Knowing.NET - Published

Writing A Technical Article, Pt. 3: Research Begins...

I'm not one of those people for whom the task of composition is a somewhat mechanical extension of increasingly detailed outlines. Nonetheless, research consumes between 80-90% of the time I spend on a technical article (note I said time and not effort -- subjectively, writing text is two or three times harder than writing C++. You can satisfy a compiler.)

In this case, research will consist of:

Integrating CodeAnalyst and Eclipse

Profiling a simple application

Implementing an image-processing application

Profiling it to discover a performance problem

Investigating that problem with CodeAnalyst

Ameliorating it

Evaluating the performance "win"

If not "big enough" go to 3

In this case, my target sample application has two algorithms that I think will be difficult:

Seam-discovery (CPU intensive)

Seam-removal (Memory-manipulation intensive)

With seam-discovery, I know that even if I implement a known-good algorithm (such as graph-cuts), I am guaranteed to peg the CPUs. My big gamble professionally is that I'm a good enough programmer to find a Step 6 "win" that I can pull off in a reasonable amount of time. A safer bet would be to choose an algorithm that would have performance problems if intentionally implemented in a naive manner (for instance, a filter that just iterated across rows and columns and, at each pixel, retrieved the neighboring pixels and averaged them. Pretty easy to tune that up!)

Now, a confession. By the time you read this, I've been somewhere not-Hawai'i for a week or so. I'll carry print outs of this paper on content-aware image resizing and \<a href="http://www.knowing.net/ct.ashx%3fid%3d383b9b44-afcb-4ac0-8162-10c966778c25%26url%3dhttp%253a%252f%252fwww.cs.cornell.edu%252frdz%252fPapers%252fBVZ-iccv99.pdf"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">this paper on graph-cuts and study them on the plane tomorrow. I'll have my laptop with me and may noodle around with source code, but it's far more likely that I'll be working with pen and paper to see if I can "get" the algorithm intuitively. Other than that, I'm going to do my darnedest not to spend too much time thinking about computers.

Coming September 19th or thereabouts: Part 4, Research Gets Underway...

Writing A Technical Article, Part 2: Gathering Tools

Probably the biggest difference between academic and commercial writing is this: academic writing is almost always concerned with algorithms and process, commercial writing is almost always driven by a specific set of technologies. In this case, I'm being paid by AMD to explain integration of CodeAnalyst and Eclipse CDT. So …
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Writing A Technical Article, Pt. 1: Background

I thought I'd try blogging the development of a technical article; it might prove interesting to, I dunno', 3 people in the world.

I've been contracted to write a 2,500-words-plus-listings article on using AMD's CodeAnalyst profiler with Eclipse, especially relating to multithreaded / multicore development. So that's a pretty beefy …
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Schadenfreude

Please, feel free to laugh at this column describing how I was completely pwned by hackers trading the German dub of 'Norbit'...
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I Dream of Djinni

"But this isn't a silver bullet!" Fabian insisted. "It's a djinni-bearing magic lamp! Not just one thing?you get three things!"

...My April 1st column for SD Times is now online...
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Software Product Lines

However, the real-world development of software product lines is hampered by the real-world limitations of maintaining a stable center as the product-line offerings spin off in a widening gyre...

Going Over the Software Product Line is the title of my latest SD Times column.
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Give it a REST

My latest in SD Times is up, in which I decide to stop being polite about WS-*.
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SD Times Latest

At the risk of sounding immodest, I think we SD Times columnists have been hitting on all cylinders for the past few issues. The latest issue includes Allen Holub on FitNesse testing, Andrew Binstock on free books for programmers, and some crap from me on XNA and non-professional programming (written …
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Column on SOAs and Windows Vista

My latest SD Times column is now available online.
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Article on personas

My latest SD Times column argues that it's time to retire Mort, Elvis, and Einstein.
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