50 in 50 presentation at JAOO 2008

Extremely well made presentation about computer languages. I think there is nearly for everyone something he has not seen or heard until today, at least not in this way. What a shame not been in Aarhus this year!
BTW this is also a very interesting style of presentation of Guy L. Steele and Richard P. Gabriel.

QCon 2008 San Francisco Slides

The slides of this years QCon 2008 in San Francisco are available here in public.

How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer

Found a well made documentation about small-world and scale-free networks produced by ABC Television. In addition to the popular books of Barabási and Watts/Strogatz this one gives a good start. At least it will be also more imaginable why the financial system can fail in days and why the “real” economy is also effected in very short time …

What I have not known about NTFS …

With Windows Vista NTFS finally supported symbolic links, either through the command line tool mklink or Explorer extensions like the Link Shell Extension. What I do not have known is that since Windows 2000 NTFS supports a kind of symbolic link already, called  Junction Point. They only can work on directories and you have to be careful if you delete them, but with a command line tool like this one it is not a problem to use them. Certainly they can help you to build up flexible  development project structures …

The Doomsday machine

Very nice pictures of the Large Hadron Collider which is nearly finished can be found here.
We all know the world will end if we switch it on …

Singularity Summit 2007

For all who are interested in the progress and current state artificial intelligence, interesting talks of this year’s summit of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence can be found here. Only a few have transcripts available, the others are only available as podcasts and sometimes hard follow. But there are lot of interesting ideas and thoughts to hear.

High Scalability

Found recently a interesting site concerning highly scalable web architectures, High Scalability. If you go through the realized architectures you see nearly never ASP or JEE (but at least some Java). Most C/C++, MySQL and Memcached besides various script languages seemed to be in favor.

Transactional Memory Garbage Collection

I#ve found a interesting paper published at OOPSLA 2007 by Dan Grossman where he points to the similar patterns in the concept of Transactional Memory and Garbage Collection. The paper is not only well written by itself it is also a good source for finding more resources for both concepts. I also think that his claims are right: Transactional Memory will never need hardware support (as was similar claimed in the beginning for GC), that TM will need more time as expected to become mainstream and that it will not make concurrency programming much easier (but it will certainly help to prevent us from visiting the most silly traps again and again …)

OSCON 2007

Great presentations form the O’Reilly OSCON 2007 conference.

Never get lost on Web 2.0

A fascinating map of trends in 2007!