Friday, December 26, 2008 3:22 PM
by
RickM
Discoveries This Week 12/26/08
Being the holiday season, it’s been a bit of a slow week. Still, I stumbled across some very good articles and sites I would like to share. I also wanted to note that I will be tagging all of my “Discoveries This Week” posts with the roundup tag for easy filtering.
In this blog Steve provides an excellent overview of developments in web browser performance over the last year and then ventures to predict what may be coming in 2009. I’m not sure I agree with all of his predictions. For example, Think “Web 2.0” would be heavily dependant on framework development. However, I would agree that the next generation of web pages will require fast Javascript engines and so there will be quite a lot of pressure for browser developers to keep up. Surely this is what Google is betting on as Chrome is the leader in fast Javascript. Still, until Chrome gets a real plugin interface and some skinning, it will never be able to eat into Firefox’s market share.
The most interesting piece of information I gleaned from this article is that Google is going to be taking page loading time into account when determining the quality score used in Adwords. I can only wonder how they plan on doing this in both an impartial and game resistant way. Will a bigger data pipe or distributed servers mean cheaper Adwords? Only time will tell.
Series: Steve Apiki’s Managing Multi-Core Projects Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6
This series covers the process of mutli-core enterprise development at many different levels. Building a capable team, defining the development processes and architecture decisions are all discussed to some degree. As these were posted in quick succession, I haven’t yet had the time to thoroughly read through any but the first in the series. However, the first article was excellent and so I would expect that they all share the same high degree of quality.
This site contains a huge number of different math algorithms taken from ACM-published computer science papers. The archive ranges from papers submitted in 1960 to today and claims to only provide algorithms has the properties of “originality, accuracy, robustness, completeness, portability, and lasting value”. References are also provided and so if you wish to understand see the algorithm in context, the option to go look up the corresponding paper is available to you. While the license is noncommercial use only, ACM is open to relicensing and so it may be still worth taking a look if you have a particularly difficult problem that needs solving.
Debug Inspector is a free addin for both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 which provides a set of tools to help with mutli-threaded debugging. This includes (but is not limited to) browsing the callstack of multiple threads at the same time, automatic deadlock detection and .NET integration. If I had this back when I was working on parallelizing our image commands it would have saved me a great deal of time. I haven’t had a good chance to put it through it’s paces yet but the reviews have all been fantastic. I suggest checking it out if it suits your needs. A small walkthrough is available here.