Some notes on our trip to England last week in no particular order or significance. […]
READ MOREWe came home after a relaxing week-long visit to England to find that my direct debit to our gym was bounced by my Wells Fargo credit card. I logged on to my account on the bank's website to find that someone in Atlanta, GA, had been "using" my credit card to rack up about $7,000 in charges, all within a couple of hours on the day we flew out of Denver. I was at 38,000 ft when the fraud occurred. The charges had triggered the automated fraud system, and Wells Fargo put a hold on the card. From which, of course, automatic debit transactions started failing including the one for the gym. […]
READ MOREIt's time for a laugh. […]
READ MOREI write a monthly column for PCPlus, a computer news-views-n-reviews magazine in the UK (actually there are 13 issues a year — there's an Xmas issue as well — so it's a bit more than monthly). The column is called Theory Workshop and appears in the back of every issue. When I signed up, my editor and the magazine were gracious enough to allow me to reprint the articles here after say a year or so. After all, the PDFs do appear on each issue's DVD after a couple of months. When I buy the current issue, I'll publish the article from the issue a year ago. Since I've just bought the issue for May 2009, here's May 2008's article. […]
READ MORELast night, I read about the new netbook OS, open source but funded by Intel, called Moblin. It’s been designed and implemented especially for Intel Atom-based netbooks, such as the Dell Mini 9 (Inspiron 910), and so I decided to give it a try. […]
READ MOREPutting this up there in case anyone else runs into this weird error. Also trying to write the text using all the search terms I used. […]
READ MOREA scenic diversion on the road to understanding JavaScript when you're a C# programmer. […]
READ MORELast time I talked about the lock-free stack and queue, I was more concerned about proving that my code was free from the ABA problem than anything else. In making my argument I naturally glossed over such niceties as the .NET memory model and so assumed (pretty much) a sequential memory model, because, to be honest, that's how we think as programmers. […]
READ MOREGetting on for 4 years ago, I wrote a series of posts on lock-free containers in .NET, like the lock-free stack and the lock-free queue. They were fun to write, mainly because of the difficulty of the topic and trying to rationalize why early versions didn't work, and so on so forth. Along the way I learned about the .NET memory model, volatile, memory fences, and other arcana, but in the end I had something that worked and worked well. Over the years since then I've had many emails from readers about lock-free containers and I've been happy to have been linked from many different places, so much so that currently I'm number 1 for "lock free stack" and queue on Google. […]
I was reading the latest PCPlus issue yesterday evening in bed — well, all right, the latest one (April) that's reached the Wild West in Colorado, which means them what's in England are probably up to June's issue or something — when I came across a paragraph that mentioned me on the PCPlus Feedback page (or if you like, the letters page). A certain Peter Atherton (obviously a man of great taste and discernment) was complimenting the Editors on an article on displaying Mandelbrot sets in Excel when he added this paragraph at the end of his letter: […]
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