Posted in General, workfriendly, programming, ocaml on Aug 29th, 2006 3 Comments »
The previous posts may have given the impression that I’m learning various languages for the sake of higher academic enlightenment. Actually the core reason is much simpler: I’ve got some performance intensive code to write, python just didn’t cut it, and in the computer language shootout benchmarks OCaml consistently kicks the collective butts of all […]
Posted in General, workfriendly, programming, ml, ocaml on Aug 29th, 2006 2 Comments »
I’ve been playing around with the ML language recently, using the OCaml implementation.
Picking up ML illustrates to me why it’s useful to learn a number of different languages in order to experience various styles of programming - it’s sometimes not enough that a language merely ’supports’ a particular style; sometimes the language must live that […]
Posted in General, workfriendly, grid on Aug 25th, 2006 2 Comments »
This looks really interesting! -Basically Amazon are offering pay-as-you-go computing. Each instance is equivalent to a physical server with 1.7 GHz Xeon CPU, 1.75 GB RAM, 160 GB of local disk, and 250 Mbps of connectivity. You even get root access. Prices are:
* $0.10 per instance-hour consumed (or part of an […]
Posted in General, workfriendly, programming on Aug 24th, 2006 No Comments »
The next Sun Niagra processor will have 64 parallel execution threads on one chip (according to this cnet article). Interesting that the initial design is a uniprocessor chip, targetting the lower end of the server market.
Time to start cranking out that massively parallel code…
Posted in Semantic Web, ArtificialIntelligence, workfriendly on Aug 18th, 2006 1 Comment »
This is old news but I’ve only just noticed that Numenta have released their whitepaper about HTM (called Hierarchical Temporal Memory - Concepts, Theory, and Terminology). Numenta is the company that Jeff Hawkins formed with Dileep and others to create products around the ideas in his ‘On Intelligence‘ book.
In short: Hawkins believes he’s got a […]
Posted in General, workfriendly, management on Aug 10th, 2006 2 Comments »
At the risk of becoming a Spolsky link blog I wanted to point people toward a recent series of articles which look at different management styles. Joel disects each with respect to managing high tech, knowledge-oriented teams.
Introduction
1) The Command and Control method
- Shout at people
2) The Econ101 method
- Incentivise people with rewards
3) […]
Posted in General, workfriendly, programming, lisp, scheme on Aug 2nd, 2006 3 Comments »
Joel Spolski rattles the java cage a second time, illustrating that:
Java is really bad at functional programming
Functional programming is really important for utilizing massively parallel hardware
In particular I like the way Spolski uses Javascript for his examples. The conception of this language has always been a bit of an enigma to me, especially given […]
Posted in workfriendly, x40 on Aug 1st, 2006 2 Comments »
This morning (like most mornings) I was doing a bit of last-minute-hacking in the station waiting for the tube. The carriage looked pretty empty when it arrived, and so rather than suspend the laptop I just picked it up and grabbed my bag. Unfortunately I then proceeded to trip over my bag strap and fling […]
