Concur.next & WF2 — Tuning Concurrent Clojure · I’ve been working on, and writing about, running Clojure Wide Finder code. But I was never satisfied with the absolute performance numbers. This is a write-up in some detail as to how I made the code faster and also slower, including lessons that might be useful to those working on Clojure specifically, concurrency more generally, and with some interesting data on Java garbage collection and JDK7 ...[15 comments]
Wide Finder 2 · Last fall, I ran the Wide Finder Project. The results were interesting, but incomplete; it was a real shoestring operation. I think this line of work is interesting, so I’m restarting it. I’ve got a new computer and a new dataset, and anyone who’s interested can play ...[18 comments]
Concur.next · Are there any computer programs that you wish were faster? Time was, you could solve that problem just by waiting; next year’s system would run them faster. No longer; Next year’s system will do more computing all right, but by giving you more CPUs, running at this year’s speed, to work with. So the only way to make your program faster is to work with more CPUs. Bad news: this is hard. Good news: we have some really promising technologies to help make it less hard. Bad news: none of them are mainstream. But I’m betting that will change ...[28 comments]
On Baked Potatoes · I recently remarked “There are very few foods indeed that compare with a high-quality Russet potato, properly baked.” A voice in the comments wondered “And what do you call ‘properly baked’?” A harmless enough question, but then aluminium foil was mentioned; shudder. Please don’t do that. Here’s how to bake potatoes correctly ...[27 comments]
Sunday Diary · A domestic wintry day (high of 3°C with gusts of very unpleasant wind) recalled and illustrated ...[1 comment]
Concur.next — Eleven Theses on Clojure · I’ve been banging away on Clojure for a few days now, and while it would obviously take months of study and grinding through a big serious real-world software project to become authoritative, I think that what I’ve learned is useful enough to share ...[27 comments]
Fortress · Since I’m spelunking around the new-languages caverns these days, I really ought to mention the long-ongoing and very interesting Fortress, brain-child of our own Guy Steele, who knows one or two things about designing languages ...[5 comments]
Oddball Beet Salad · Last weekend, friends were about and we went to the market and I made lurid bicoloured salad for the ballgame and it was all good. With pictures and a recipe ...[1 comment]
Concur.next — Idiomatic Clojure · I’m starting to wind down my Clojure research, but I’m feeling a little guilty about having exposed people to my klunky Lisp-newbie code, perhaps giving a false impression of how the language feels. So I’d like to show you what it looks like when it’s created by someone who’s actually part of the tribe and thinks in it more natively than I probably ever will ...[12 comments]
Concur.next — Tab Sweep · Being a basket of concurrency-related morsels too short to stand alone and to long to tweet ...[4 comments]
Vision Hackers · It worries me that, as a resident of Vancouver off-and-on since 1983, I am engaged so much on the Internet and so little in my home-town. My local outings have been limited to music, children’s sports, and dining out with friends. I’m attempting to become more local and have thus recently become a member of two organizations: the Vancouver Hack Space (Motto: Down with Betamax! <snicker>) and Vision Vancouver. They aren’t like each other at all ...[1 comment]
Rebuilding the World · What happened was that, for reasons which I’ll write about under the Concur.next rubric, I wanted to turn my attention back briefly to Erlang. Which means that I needed to fetch & build the latest version. Which ended up costing me three days of Open-source yak shaving. Which had a happy ending and some lessons to teach ...[4 comments]
Concur.next — No Free Lunch · In which the actual costs of running concurrently are examined, and seem shockingly high ...[12 comments]
Not Driving · Recently, I’ve been taking public transit around town more and more. The advent of the Canada Line is one reason, and another is that since I’ve been carrying the Android-flavored Internet in my pocket, travel time isn’t necessarily downtime. Plus, as I steer thousands of pounds of steel and glass and so on around town, the proportion of my mind that’s thinking about carbon-loading keeps increasing unnervingly ...[6 comments]
Concur.next — More Clojure I/O · I recently wrote-up some Clojure-based Wide Finder work, in Parallel I/O and References. Driven mostly by ideas from commenters, I did some refactoring and knob-spinning. The results are interim at best, and on US-Thanksgiving eve almost nobody’s looking, but it’s good to get this stuff on the record ...[4 comments]
Green Phone · I’ve noticed that having an Android in my pocket makes me more likely to take public transit around town as opposed to driving. Yeah, it takes a little longer, but it’s not downtime; I can be catching up on email and admin work and so on. A huge amount of most people’s workload is manageable given anything with a decent email client and browser ...[8 comments]
Disinvesting In the USA · Tuesday on Twitter I said “Moved the % of US equities in my long-term portfolio down from moderate to basically zero.” I got a lot of questions so here’s more ...[14 comments]
