Wednesday 17 November 2010

Cloning Technology

Concurrent Programming with Revisions and Isolation Types from Microsoft Research (here) is an approach to concurrent programming looking extremely similar to Sieve C++ (described herehere and  here) developed at Codeplay.


How to setup virtual box shared folders to access host data from the Linux OS inside the VM after installing the guest addons; it works, but is very much slower than a real machine.


Intel have released an alpha OpenCL implementation (for X86).
There is also an interesting performance guide, SIGGRAPH slides, noting that transformations to code beneficial on GPU are not optimisations on X86 (e.g. exploitation of hierarchical memory spaces via __local etc).

Sunday 7 November 2010

Crashing Around You

One who seeks knowledge learns something new every day.
One who seeks the Tao unlearns something new every day.
Less and less remains until you arrive at non-action.
When you arrive at non-action,
nothing will be left undone.
The above is a commit message: I wish it had been informative, not pretentious.
Its time for operating systems to prohibit the space character in file and directory names. Too much breakage with respect to quoting even today, and this is a classic known issue in programming since before I was born.
Ubuntu 10.10 installs pretty straightforwardly in VirtualBox, but you need to install the "Guest Addons" from Virtual Box to teach it that there is a monitor capable of more than 800x600 resolution. Sony Vaio laptops need the virtualisation of the hardware enabled in the BIOS to let VirtualBox run the VM it creates: thats the first BIOS I have seen in, four? years or more. F2 gets the BIOS up at boot, and the enable virtualisation option is there. Note that this is after the BIOS update, that obsoletes all the dangerous hacks on the net that talk of unofficial BIOS updates / patches, that are now sitting around on the web to break careless readers.