, 2 min read
Android application programs are usually written in the Java programming language. Java source code is compiled to bytecode, which is then interpreted by the Java virtual machine. Current virtual machines (VM for short) use two tricks to improve performance: compile bytecode to machine code during…
, 1 min read
I was just asked this question and referred to Phoronix: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS: 32-bit vs. 64-bit Performance. Phoronix is this excellent website run by Michael Larabel. Below is a chart from 2012. Not all charts look this astonishing! This was also true in 2006, see below compilation times. So the…
, 3 min read
Occasionally I teach customers and colleagues how to use some aspects of Linux, or how to use and administrate newly developed software on Linux. I regularly use either VNC or kibitz for this. While VNC is somewhat known to many people, kibitz seems to be like a hidden germ, unbeknownst to…
, 1 min read
Some facts on Wikipedia: Wikipedia uses round about 1,200 servers, see Tactical Monitoring Overview. These servers are located in Ashburn (Virginia), Tampa (Florida), San Francisco, and Amsterdam, see servers. Wikipedia has about 4.5 million pages, see statistics. Wikipedia uses Ubuntu exclusively…
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This week I upgraded again, this time from 50 MBit/s to 100 MBit/s. My internet service provider is Unitymedia with whom I had positive experience since 2009, see Unitymedia experience. They phoned me mid of November and asked whether I would be interested in upgrading from 50 to 100, it would cost…
, 1 min read
Great article about Einstein@Home by Brian Koberlein: Astronomy at Home – Brian Koberlein. This is interesting in particular: The team used the distributed computing network to analyze x-ray data from the Fermi gamma ray telescope. From this they found four new gamma ray pulsars. Most gamma ray…
, 3 min read
This article "CUDA-Enabled GPUs" made me check my GPU again using deviceQuery in /usr/local/cuda/samples/sdk/1_Utilities/deviceQuery: CUDA Device Query (Runtime API) version (CUDART static linking) Detected 1 CUDA Capable device(s) Device 0: "GeForce GTX 560" CUDA Driver…
, 4 min read
There are a variety of ways to work with queues: You can purchase IBM WebSphere MQ (formerly known as MQSeries), or similar products from Oracle or Microsoft. On most Unix systems queues are already built in, as long as you do not need any functionality to cross machine boundaries, i.e., hop from…
, 1 min read
Comparing the academic industry with a rather disparate industry, thereby highlighting a number of shortcomings of the current situation in academia. Also see Marcio von Muhlen: We Need a Github of Science, documenting the "Profzi"-scheme. Interesting article from Alexandre Alfonso on…
, 1 min read
Most IT people know about trojan horses, virus, worms, honeypots, etc. They know about buffer overruns, SQL injection and the like. What is probably not that well known is that even "friendships" on social networks can pose some risks: They give credibility to possibly complete fake…
, 15 min read
Malcolm Gladwell held a speech at Google Zeitgeist Americas 2013 about drop-out rates in schools, especially in math and science. It turns out that going to one of the top universities is rarely a good idea, contrary to popular belief. Some quotes: EICD - elite institution cognitive disorder Your…
, 1 min read
A recent article "Five Minutes with Alison Barrett" linked to a speech by Alison Barrett on Unit Testing in particular in PHP. The speech almost in passing made a reference to a famous quote on "good fast cheap, pick two", which I found quite noteworthy. Using Google I found a…
, 1 min read
Thanks for reading my blog. Not all countries are shown in above picture. See My Blog Statistics by Country from September.
, 2 min read
Programming in Excel VBA is quite easy. Below are some simple basic concepts to access and change the spreadsheet data. Worksheets(i) references the i-th sheet, usually they are called Sheet1, Sheet2, Sheet3 Cells(i,j) references i-th row, j-th column, e.g., Cells(2,3) is C2 Cells(i,j).Value is…
, 1 min read
Brian Koberlein blogged in Ugly Theory, Beautiful Data why he is in the dark matter camp, and not in the MOND camp. He very nicely weights each of the arguments of each theory to conclude why there is compelling evidence for dark matter. He concludes with: Of course dark matter still has a serious…
, 1 min read
Saroo Brierley used Google Earth to find his lost mother in India after more than 25 years of separation. When Saroo was 5 years old he wrongly took a train to Calcutta near from his home-town which was more than 1,500 km away. In Calcutta he was adopted by an Australian couple. It is amazing what…
, 1 min read
From time to time I check what I have collected as cookies in my browser and I spot web sites which I probably have never visited directly but somehow set cookies. Instead of deleting them individually I now use sqlite3 to do this. cd ~/.config/google-chrome/Default sqlite3 Cookies "delete…
, 4 min read
I was recently asked about my opinion regarding agile software development. I think the core problem is not agile or extreme programming, or object-oriented or structured. I think this simply misses the point. Below are the key ingredients to succeed in software development when it comes to…
, 1 min read
Good summary of some current JavaScript grid solutions. See also JavaScript Open-Source Spreadsheets and Data Grids.
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Architecture per core: At the chip level, 8 cores per CPU: Registers per core: Unfortunately I didn't find opcode clock cycles on AMD's website. AMD's website seems to be almost unmaintained, i.e., lots of dead links. Below are some clock cycles gathered through experiment by Agner Fog. I took…