Sunday, June 03, 2012

Nerd Food: Interesting...

Nerd Food: Interesting…

Some interesting stuff I bumped into these last couple of weeks.

C++

  • LLVM 3.1 Release Notes: Clang/LLVM 3.1 is out! To be fair I'm more GCC 4.7 these days, as the C++ 11 support is a bit more mature - but as soon as I get a chance I'll try to play around with Clang again. I got to say I was a bit underwhelmed with the amount of C++ 11 features on this release, but I guess they're not that far now.
  • Elements of Modern C++ Style: A classic overview text on C++ 11 by Sutter.
  • The C++ Pub Quiz: This would have been so useful a few weeks ago, its not even funny. Don't start a pub quiz without it.
  • C++ 2011: Great overview of C++ 11 by Dietmar Kuhl. Its a presentation - it would be great to get the video.
  • Perfect forwarding and overload resolution and C++11 range-based for loop: There's just so much new stuff with C++ 11 its hard to keep up. Boris blog is, as usual, the place to go for in-depth discussions of C++ 11 machinery. What I quite like about his posts is that he focuses on non-obvious issues of these new features, which is a great time-saver for C++ 11 newbies.
  • Monte Carlo C++ AMP: I haven't had a lot of time to look into AMP, but it seems quite interesting. This article gives a good practical starting point. Of course, being a Linux dude, OpenCL is more my kind of solution, but its always good to keep up with Microsoft.
  • The Future of C++ Concurrency and Parallelism: Some reflections by Bartosz on concurrency and C++ 11. Its good to understand what we got - in terms of the options available - and we're we are going.

Other Programming Topics

  • Highlights from the PostgreSQL 9.2 beta: LWN rocks, as usual. Its shaping up to be another amazing Postgres release. If you are a heavy cache user, you may want to have a look at the potential of HStore with JSON. Range types look interesting, and performance has improved - as usual. Random quote: "PostgreSQL now scales smoothly to 64 cores and over 350,000 queries per second, compared to topping out at 24 cores and 75,000 queries per second on PostgreSQL 9.1. Throughput is better even at low numbers of cores.".
  • LGM: GIMP's new release, new über-core, and future: More LWN rockage. I'm by no means an arty person, and I very rarely use the GIMP - yet I find its development to be extremely instructive. People don't seem to realise that GTK is an offshoot of GIMP just like GEGL. They may be slow but make no mistake, these people are geniuses. Great to see that progress is now in leaps and bounds.
  • Emacs: How to Copy/Cut Current Line: A couple of useful productivity functions by Xah Lee. A bit like dd on vi.
  • Tanenbaum’s advice for building product, networks, and living life: Although I was more of a Linus fan-boy on the Torvalds v Tanebaum, I got to say I really respect the man. Bumped into this post; its much more widely applicable than just for protocol design. Visionary, really.
  • How Google Developers Use Ubuntu: (video) Never quite realised just how big Ubuntu was at Google. To be fair, I kind of assumed they'd be using some kind of Debian - making your own distribution is just silly. But still, its good to see that they get it.
  • Writing a CV in LaTeX: I'm not really looking for work right now - having too much fun hacking at home! - but when the time comes to join the merry go round, I'll try to write my CV in LaTeX rather than LibreOffice.

Finance

  • The fourth quadrant: A map of the limits of statistics : Bumped into this old essay from Taleb. As usual very thoughtful. Its very important we don't blame the tools but instead reflect on their usage, very much like Taleb and Wilmott keep on insisting.
  • CDS and Synthetic CDOs Explained: CDS and CDO's are so key to the current financial problems that its vital to have a good understanding of their inner workings. But often they are explained in really baffling terms. Myers does a better job than most.

Other

  • So You Want to Open Source Your Code?: I've got the utmost respect for the Kitware guys, makers of CMake, CDash et al. Not only they were really early birds in understanding how to merge FOSS and business, but they really kept at it without ever wavering. This post explains the key things to bear in mind when trying to put your internal code out in the community - and making a success of it. It distils their experience so definitely worth a read if you are thinking about this sort of thing.
  • Christian Right Lobbies To Overturn Second Law Of Thermodynamics: The onion just rocks, their parody is just so spot in its cringe-worthy.
  • A Screaming Man: Watched this on TV5. Unfortunately my French isn't great so missed a bit, but seemed like a great movie and the soundtrack was amazing. In particular, will be buying some Ballaké Sissoko stuff real soon now.

Date: 2012-06-03 19:27:19 BST

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