Posts filed under the 'Blog' category


Roger Moore as male knitting model

It’s a little known fact that Roger Moore (he of the James Bond movies in the 70s and 80s and The Saint in the 60s) started out as a male model before he started to become more famous. As such, he was renowned for appearing in knitwear shots (to the extent of being known as ‘The Big Knit’) in the early 50s. […]

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Retro camera: Fujica ST605N

The last couple of weeks has been spent sorting out stuff from my parents’ house. Some to be shipped here to the States, some that my sister was taking, some Victoriana (mostly furniture) to be auctioned off, and the rest to be disposed of. One of the things from my past that I found was my first 35mm SLR camera. […]

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Bye, Mum

To say that the last three to four months have been grim is to understate it somewhat. On 13 December last year, in the middle of the night, Dad had a cardiac arrest and, being Dad, did nothing about it until the next morning when finally he was rushed to hospital. He died a week later of another heart attack, on 21 December. […]

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Nasty ABA problem in array-based lock-free stack

Stack of books and laptopIn the comments to my post on testing the lock-free stack, Dmitriy V'jukov wondered if my code could test a broken implementation of a stack built on a preallocated array. He provided a link to the code on a Russian forum (yes, I used Google Translate a lot). It seems it’s not his, but a friend’s or a colleague’s. […]

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Testing the lock-free queue

Having discussed a test app for testing the multithreaded use of the lock-free stack, it’s now time for the lock-free queue. […]

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Testing the lock-free stack

Stack of books with laptop on topRecently a reader was having some issues with my lock-free queue implementation. In investigating the problem, I decided to throw out my previous “stack and queue” multithreaded test program as being way too hard to modify and started out afresh. In doing so, I also cleaned up the implementations of the lock-free stack and queue, making extensive use of CodeRush’s code issues functionality. […]

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MTF Charts

I was looking at the following lens, Canon EF-S 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS, on Amazon today. The reason is simple: my favorite zoom is the Canon 28-135mm and I also have a Canon 20-35mm zoom. This could replace both, in theory. At something like $340, it’s affordable too. But how good is it? […]

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Typography, the first steps

Every now and then I help out with cases in the Special Victims’ Unit (SVU) for the 4th Judicial District of Colorado, the district for which my wife is Deputy District Attorney. In general, the cases I help with on the periphery are the computer crime cases, mostly about child pornography (CP). […]

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Code Kata

For some reason this whole Code Kata movement passed me by, so I'm coming late to the party, but I'm getting hooked. […]

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The Daily Shoot 94

The task for the Daily Shoot on Wednesday 17th February (#ds94) was "Fragility conveys tension. Make a photo today of a person or object in a fragile state." This one was somewhat difficult. I wanted to find something outside that would illustrate this (some of the early photos on the page had set me thinking), but there was nothing nearby that I could think of or that I saw when going to the dry cleaner's at lunchtime. So, instead I set up a staged shot: […]

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