A site devoted mostly to everything related to Information Technology under the sun - among other things.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

The Human Camera

If you have never seen this before, you are in for a treat. Open here: http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=0k4lsi1dql

Sunday, March 28, 2010

Innovation Delusion

An article by Ralph Gomory from the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ralph-gomory/the-innovation-delusion_b_480794.html

Concurrency in Java 5

J2SE 5 very much extends and expands the concurrency model of Java. The very useful concurrency communication classes such as (bounded and unbounded) queues are introduced.

One of the best parts of new improved Java concurrency model is the new java.util.concurrent.BlockingQueue interface.

LinkedBlockingQueues and ArrayBlockingQueues do away with wait(), notify() and notifyAll() style of coding. Add to that Synchronized queues, which are simply amazing, as well as DelayQueue classes and PriorityBlockingQueues and you have yourself a whole lot of threading fun!

Other useful classes are CountDownLatch, CyclicBarrier, Executor,
CachedThreadPools, FixedThreadPools, SingleThreadExecutors, ExecutorServices, Futures, and Callable.

I think it is a good idea to look into learning synchronous, asynchronous queues, and cached threading pools, and then delve into performance considerations for atomic, lock, and concurrent methods of class, method, and attribute concurrency.

Note that there are command line switches important to concurrent programming (-X*) and also that there Runtime classes designed to help avoid OutOfMemory heap problems.

Some of these exciting stuff is covered in the "Thinking in Java 4" by Bruce Eckel but that book does not concentrate on concurrent programming.

The book to read is:

Java Concurrency in Practice
by Brian Goetz, Tim Peierls, Joshua Bloch, Joseph Bowbeer, David Holmes, Doug Lea

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Pivot for Web Exploration

An interesting presentation and web data visualization tool by Gary Flake (a Microsoft Technical Fellow):

http://www.ted.com/talks/gary_flake_is_pivot_a_turning_point_for_web_exploration.html

The tool is available from Microsoft Labs.

Windows Installer CleanUp Utility

Windows Installer CleanUp Utility might be able to help remove installation information for programs that were installed by using Windows Installer. Be aware that it will not remove the actual program from the computer but will remove the installation files so that one may re-start the installation, upgrade, or uninstall.

Windows Installer CleanUp Utility (for all 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Microsoft Windows) may be found @ http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301

Monday, March 1, 2010

About Me

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I am a senior software developer working for General Motors Corporation.. I am interested in intelligent computing and scientific computing. I am passionate about computers as enablers for human imagination. The contents of this site are not in any way, shape, or form endorsed, approved, or otherwise authorized by HP, its subsidiaries, or its officers and shareholders.

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