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December 2005 - Posts

Improving your own memory

It is so funny that we spend such amount of time optimizing data structures, but we never think about training our own (natural) memory. At least, I haven't thought about this until I just stumbled on this article . Here is a list of techniques: Introduction Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 29, 2005 11:47 AM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments
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How to do atomic writes in a file

Let's assume that you want is to write some simple code that writes to a text file. A few assumptions: 1) You need avoid corruptions of any kind. 2) Either all of your writes have to make it to the disk, or none of them. 3) The file is updated serially Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 28, 2005 2:51 PM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments

Puzzle: probability problem

Here is an interesting probability problem who recently generated long discussions in our team: Say that you have an array of N boolean values, with all values initially set to FALSE. At each iteration step, you arbitrary pick an element in the array Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 28, 2005 1:56 PM by AdiOltean | 6 Comments
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Cool way to get customer feedback

Lenovo tries to understand whether we prefer titanium or black for the next ThinkPad. And set up a really nice flash-based questionnaire: http://www.whichsideareyouon.com So far, it looks like Titanium got most votes by large margin... Read More...
Posted Saturday, December 17, 2005 10:07 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments
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Funny experiment

OK - here is an surprising experiment. Do you know what this does? 1) Open some UI that contains an edit box (like notepad, or even the Start\Run... dialog) 2) Type something 3) Press Ctrl + Right Shift 4) Type something 5) Press Ctrl + Left Shift etc.. Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 13, 2005 8:39 PM by AdiOltean | 11 Comments
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Are the SATA disks reliable enough?

An empirical report was recently published by Jim Gray and Catharine van Ingen. Here is the summary: The SATA advertised bit error rate of one error in 10 terabytes is frightening. We moved 2 PB through low-cost hardware and saw five disk read error events, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 13, 2005 5:40 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments

Bloom filters and everything else

If, by some strange and unexplained phenomenon, all blogs on blogs.msdn.com will dissapear, except one, then my preference would be for http://blogs.msdn.com/devdev/ Very interesting stuff. I am already waiting for the next post... :-) Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 13, 2005 10:42 AM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments
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How to stop filesharers from stealing hotel bandwidth

Simply brilliant: http://www.signal15.com/articles/2005/12/06/how-to-stop-filesharers-from-stealing-hotel-bandwidth Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 08, 2005 1:06 AM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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Batch processing is back!

It's interesting that the Cell Broadband Engine is reviving batch-based computing as one of their preffered development paradigms. http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-fpfunleashing/?ca=dgr-lnxw01CellUnleash Maybe it makes sense in certain Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 08, 2005 12:17 AM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments
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Windows Local Live is out in the wild!

Here it is: http://local.live.com Check out some cool bird's eye images: - Space Needle - Microsoft campus . [ Update - Dec 8, 11 PM ] It turns out that the service is not exposed to the public yet. Funny enough, it works fine from my dev box, but not Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 07, 2005 2:43 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments

Will the giants fade away?

Something interesting happened in the last few years. Something that I haven't explicity realized until I read Ross Levinsohn's statement . (Maybe you already know - Ross Levinsohn is the president of Fox Interactive Media, a large company who owns the Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 07, 2005 12:54 PM by AdiOltean | 3 Comments

Search Technology Center - opened by Microsoft in China

I am watching with a lot of interest the evolution of search technologies in China - everyone knows about baidu.com (which seems to be the fifth most visited site on the internet, according to Alexa , just behind MSN, Yahoo and Google). But one interesting Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 07, 2005 12:25 PM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments

Pure Gold XBox 360 faceplate

I am amazed too about the eBay XBox 360 mania (as noted in my previous post ). But I didn't thought that I've just barely scratched the surface here. How about a XBox face plate made from pure gold ? It's yours for only $36,000.00 on eBay . (yes, I correctly Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 07, 2005 12:05 PM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments

Home-made XBox 360 auctioned on eBay for $611

OK - this is getting out of hand... :-) "I never (actually) thought people would bid on this," wrote the seller, who goes by the eBay screen name "silentbarrel," in response to an e-mail inquiry Friday. "I thought most people that were spending any money Read More...
Posted Wednesday, December 07, 2005 12:20 AM by AdiOltean | 0 Comments

Did you know that MySpace.com runs ASP.NET 2.0 on x64?

I found this quote interesting: The Internet Information Services 6.0 Web server featured in the OS has been enhanced with 64-bit support. This provides access to more memory and scalability for applications, Goldfarb said. "In high-performance scenarios, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 06, 2005 11:21 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments

Windows Server 2003 R2 is now RTM

These are the good old days. Windows Server 2003 R2 is now released to manufacturing! R2 was a very interesting release. Very different from previous ones in terms of how it was developed. Think about it: it took around two years to develop (actually Read More...
Posted Tuesday, December 06, 2005 9:52 PM by AdiOltean | 2 Comments
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digg.com - the new Slashdot?

I just discovered digg.com a few days ago, and I am hooked. So far, it seems surprisingly good. IMHO, it is almost as good and even surpasses Slashdot in many aspects: traffic (although alexa.com might be misleading here), volume of posts, fresh news, Read More...
Posted Thursday, December 01, 2005 10:40 PM by AdiOltean | 1 Comments
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