Free FORTRAN 95 Compiler

http://www.g95.org/downloads.shtml#Win

Science and Technology Pipeline

There have been persistent reports on how U.S. is failing to educate sufficient numbers of students for careers in the sciences—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

The short answer is that the supply is there - bright and intelligent students - but the corresponding jobs are not there.

See the R&D Magazine Weblog @ http://www.rdmag.com/Blogs-Leaks-in-the-Pipeline/?wnnvz=cIpb87iV1KLyAeAj as well as a related report from the Rutgers University @ http://www.heldrich.rutgers.edu/uploadedFiles/Publications/STEM_Paper_Final.pdf

Sounds of Windows

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1Iup7iDaeQ&feature=player_embedded

Windows 7 isn't included because the sounds are identical to Vista.

A Very Tiny Flash Drive

http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/thumb-drives-storage/a6d9/

Windows 7 Whopper

http://www.techeblog.com/index.php/tech-gadget/windows-7-whopper

Innovation in India

From the Wall Street Journal, 10/21/2009:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125598988906795035.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

Enterprise Generation Langauge (Free from IBM)

EGL CE is a free Eclipse-based tool that simplifies development of JavaScript-based Web applications. Developers who traditionally code in PHP, Ruby on Rails, Groovy, JavaScript and HTML can now download free EGL tools to code, test, and debug rich Web 2.0 applications in one simplified language. It is available @ http://www-949.ibm.com/software/rational/cafe/community/egl/ce

FlightCaster - the Future?

Is FlightCaster project the future of programming?

FlightCaster uses Hadoop, Clojure, and Amazon Web Services to deliver a predictive system for flight delays (took about 4 months) with 85% success rate predicting long delays. See http://www.sdtimes.com/link/33813

Clojure

Clojure is a compiled functional dynamic programming language that targets JVM and CLR. Learn more about it @ http://clojure.org/

Hadoop

Hadoop is an open-source Java software framework for data-intensive distributed applications. It enables applications to interact with thousands of data nodes.

Hadoop is an implementation of MapReduce which is a programming model for processing and generating large data sets. Users specify a map function that processes a key/value pair to generate a set of intermediate key/value pairs, and a reduce function that merges all intermediate values associated with the same intermediate key.

Programs written in this functional style are automatically parallelized and executed on a large cluster of commodity machines. The run-time system takes care of the details of partitioning the input data, scheduling the program's execution across a set of machines, handling machine failures, and managing the required inter-machine communication. This allows programmers without any experience with parallel and distributed systems to easily utilize the resources of a large distributed system.

Hadoop was created by Doug Cutting, currently with Cloudera.

JIRA Studio

JIRA Studio, from Atlassian Inc., provides hosted versions of Subversion, Confluence (a wiki), JIRA (bug tracker), FishEye (SCM analysis) and Crucible (peer code review) for $ 25.00 per developer per month; good for small distributed teams. Find it @ http://www.atlassian.com/studio/

MonoTouch

MonoTouch enables developers to create C# and .NET-based applications that run on Apple's iPhone and Apple's iPod Touch devices; taking advantage of the iPhone APIs and reusing both code and libraries that have been built for .NET. Find it @ http://monotouch.net/

Ages of Man

U.S. Engineers At A Disadvantage

Join the discussion @ http://www.eetimes.com/tigforums/thread.jspa;jsessionid=RY3HMMRRRXU11QE1GHPSKH4ATMY32JVN?threadID=7094

Tired

CppDepend

Issam Lahlali is editing a tool for C++ developers: CppDepend. CppDepend is a static analyzer that simplifies managing complex C++ code base. Find it @

http://www.cppdepend.com/Features.aspx

Fun in Design

The systems that we build are, more often than not, quite constipating and boring. Things, including software systems, ought to be fun. See below:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lXh2n0aPyw&feature=player_embedded

Salary Survey

From the October 2009 issue of the Redmond Magazine:

http://redmondmag.com/salarysurveys/

Interesting Web Sites

http://www.boingboing.net/ is a popular Web log full of tech tips, popular culture, and curio.

http://www.etsy.com/ is a site for buying and selling hand-made goods.

www.google.com/trends displays the top 100 searches at any given moment of time.

www.hownottoactold.com/ is a site with insightful advise to the over-the-forty crowd on how not to act old.

http://www.pandora.com/ is a music site that suggests other music that one might like.

http://www.technorati.com/ lists which Web logs and puts are getting how much attention.

http://www.tenbyten.org/ is a constantly changing collection of 100 words and pictures that define the moment.

http://www.xanga.com/ is a social networking site that enables users to create a personal profile, include music and graphics, and keep a public Web log.

http://www.yelp.com/ is a collection of user reviews of restaurants, shops, and services.

BI Heavy Lifting

Key trends in BI from an article by Patrick McCollum and Craig Izydor in the October 2009 issue of Information Management magazine:


"... The IT organization will continue to:

•Enhance BI project management processes to reduce risk and budget overruns,
•Consolidate the BI application footprint to reduce application, data and support costs, and
•Closely partner with business leadership to define and justify BI projects.
•Given the economy, there are some fundamental trends regardless of industry.
•Funding is limited. Businesses will approach IT investments differently as funding is tied to company cash flow as well as market conditions.
•Capital investments are difficult to obtain and, in many cases, require approval from the board of directors. Defining compelling business value is a must.
•Investment funding is tied to stock or market performance so businesses can better manage cash flow. Deferring, shelving or canceling projects is common.
•Projects have been broken into smaller, incremental efforts that are funded within fiscal periods or quarters to closely manage capital and validate business value.
•"Quick hits" are gaining emphasis as business teams are looking to get information sooner and may not wish IT to run everything through a data warehouse for key business insights. A challenge is that they may lose attention on getting solutions backfilled in the proper architecture at a later time. "

ROSE

ROSE is an open source compiler infrastructure to build source-to-source program transformation and analysis tools for large-scale Fortran 77/95/2003, C, C++, OpenMP, and UPC applications. Find it @ http://www.rosecompiler.org/

Threading References

From the article “Three Sides of Threading” by Claire Cates in the October 2009 issue of the Software Test & Performance Magazine:

Developing Multithreaded Applications: A Platform Consistent Approach @
http://cache-www.intel.com/cd/00/00/05/15/51534_developing_multithreaded_applications.pdf

Multithreading Programming Guide @ http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/816-5137

Dr. Dobbs: Performance Analysis and Multicore Processors : March 30, 2006 @ http://www.ddj.com/dept/64bit/184417069

Dr Dobbs: Multitasking Alternatives and the Perils of Preemption: Sept 14, 2006 @ http://www.ddj.com/dept/embedded/193000965

Data Placement in Threaded Programs: from the Intel Software Network Threading Methodology: Principles and Practices @
http://cache-www.intel.com/cd/00/00/21/93/219349_threadingmethodology.pdf

Intel Software Developer Webinar Series, Fall 2007

W. Brown, R. Malveau, H. McCormick III, T. Mowbray, “AntiPatterns: Refactoring Software, Architectures, and Projects in Crisis,” John Wiley, New York (1998)

C. Smith, L.Williams, “More New Software AntiPatterns,” Proceedings of 2003 Computer Measurement Group

Multicore programming made easy?

From the Embedded System Design Magazine:

http://www.embedded.com/design/multicore/220100841?_requestid=97298

Future of Knowledge Work

I thought that these two articles from the KMWorld (Knowledge Management World) magazine might be of interest to those looking for better opportunities.

http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/News/News-Analysis/The-future-of-knowledge-workers,-Part-1-55779.aspx

http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/News/News-Analysis/The-future-of-knowledge-workers,-Part-2-56186.aspx

The Invisible Man

Liu Bolin paints himself, without any trick photography.