I am only about a hundred pages into this book, but it had paid for itself after fifty. I wish I'd read it ten years ago. Actually, I wish I'd read it nineteen years ago when I started my first programming job, but it hadn't been written then. Techies, if you haven't read it, I strongly advise you to do so at your earliest convenience. It's about ( Read more... )

If I ever design a first course in compilers, I'll do it backwards: we'll start with code generation, move on to static analysis, then parse a token stream and finally lex source text. As we go along, students will be required to implement a small compiler for a simple language, using the techniques they've just learned. The (excellent) Stanford/ ( Read more... )

Quaffing the last of my quickening cup ( Read more... )

[Wherein we review an academic conference in the High/Low/Crush/Goal/Bane format used for reviewing juggling conventions on rec.juggling.]

High: My old Codeplay colleague Ally Donaldson's FAT-GPU workshop. He was talking about his GPUVerify system, which takes CUDA or OpenCL programs and either proves them free of data races and synchronisation- ( Read more... )

I've been using Mercurial (also known as hg) as the version-control system for a project at work. I'd heard good things about it - a Git-like system with a cleaner UI and better documentation - and was glad of the excuse to try it out. Unfortunately, I was disappointed by what I found. The docs are good, and the UI's a bit cleaner, but it's still ( Read more... )

I've been running benchmarks again. The basic workflow is

1. Create some number of directories containing the benchmark suites I want to run.
2. Tweak the Makefiles so benchmarks are compiled and run with the compilers, simulators, libraries, flags, etc, that I care about.
3. Optionally tweak the source code to (for instance) change the number of ( Read more... )

Inspired by Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names, Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Time, and far, far too much time spent fighting autotools. Thanks to Aaron Crane, totherme and zeecat for their comments on earlier versions.It is accepted by all decent people that Make sucks and needs to die, and that autotools needs to be shot, decapitated, staked ( Read more... )

I've recently submitted a couple of talk proposals to upcoming conferences. Here are the abstracts.

Machine learning in (without loss of generality) Perl
London Perl Workshop, Saturday 24th November 2012. 25 minutes.If you read a book or take a course on machine learning, you'll probably spend a lot of time learning about how to implement standard ( Read more... )

Remember how a few years ago PCs were advertised with the number of MHz or GHz their processors ran at prominently featured? And how the numbers were constantly going up? You may have noticed that the numbers don't go up much any more, but now computers are advertised as "dual-core" or "quad-core". The reason that changed is power consumption. ( Read more... )

1. Start tracking my weight and calorie intake again, and get my weight back down to a level where I'm comfortable. I've been very slack on the actual calorie-tracking, but I have lost nearly a stone, and at the moment I'm bobbing along between 11st and about 11st 4lb. It would be nice to be below 11st, but I find I'm actually pretty comfortable at ( Read more... )