August 2006

published: Wed, 2-Aug-2006   |   updated: Fri, 5-Aug-2016

Here are the articles that were published in August 2006.

Probing Encarta 2007

Last time I was visiting Microsoft, the organizers for the event I was attending had provided a trip to the company store, together with a voucher allowing us to spend up to $120 on software and hardware. Before you start thinking that's way too little to buy anything of import, realize that the Microsoft Company Store has deep discounts. Amongst other things, I picked up a copy of Encarta Premium 2007 for $20. I like Encarta (I'd bought my previous version of it at the company store too), but this time, it came with a little frisson. If you like algorithms (duh, that's why you're here) and you program in Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0 and want a little fun, read on. Read more...

My First Play

I was ferreting around in the basement this morning looking for something completely different, when I came across the programme and a photo of the cast of the very first play I was in. Oh, man! This one takes me back. Waaaay back. It was just before my seventeenth birthday, I was in the Lower Sixth at Ernest Bailey Grammar School in Matlock (that's in Derbyshire, England for my non-UK readers, and for my American readers it's pronounced "darby-shih"), and I had a part in The Diary of Anne Frank. So, be warned: it's more of a personal post this time, and likely to only be of interest to my fellow schoolmates who were in it. Read more...

Lock-Free Linked List (Part 3)

So last time, just like a cheesy Saturday morning movie serial, I left you hanging, wondering how I was going to solve the insoluble in C#. The insoluble issue in this case is the fact that we have two items of information that will vary independently of each other in different threads, but that we need to see as a unit when we write new values of them using CAS. And, of course, the size of both items is more than the size we can CAS. Read more...

Lock-Free Linked List (part 2)

Last time in this series of articles on lock-free linked lists we pointed out some of the issues we needed to solve in order to have any chance of implementing such a data structure. These were to do with deleting nodes from the list: the first being that deleted nodes could not be disposed or reused since other threads may still be using them, and the other was the problem of inserting a node after a node that was just about to be deleted. I ended with the subtle hint that we would have to add some extra fields to our node class. Read more...