Despite getting a sheet-fed scanner, I still use my flat-bed scanner to scan, mainly photos. The last couple of times we've been home, Mum has given us some old photos. Well, not necessarily given, but lent so that I could scan them and, if needed, print better ones. […]
About three months ago, as I was trying to gather documentation for my taxes to take along to my accountant, something finally snapped. I had all these invoices and statements and papers in a big old folder, and I was flipping through them, trying to find documents relevant to my taxes. In the closet in my office there's a bunch of other folders for previous years too. Ditto, the basement (oh, heck, I really need to sort it all out down there). It's a big mess. […]
Last night, I had to draw a regular hexagon in Adobe Illustrator, Now, I remember from my school days how to draw one with a compass and ruler (draw a circle with the compasses, and then select a point on the circumference and mark off radii with the compasses, going round the circle; you'll mark off six intersections and then connect them with straight lines: voilà!), but I don't have any compasses in Illustrator. […]
READ MORESome 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 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 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. […]