I just had the experience of watching ‘The Skeleton Key‘, a bit of a scary one. I don’t want to spoil the movie for anyone, but once you’ve seen it, and if you’re familiar with the tales of H.P. Lovecraft, then you should know what I mean when I say almost complete rip-off (cough – Thing On The Doorstep – cough). That said, the movie is quite well done, and I’ve got shivers following it.
Now I’m watching ‘Old Boy‘. Fun for all the family.
Rabo Direct / Truth In Advertising
I was recently reintroduced to the mini-movie ‘Truth In Advertising‘, which is really funny and reminds me that the current batch of Rabo Direct ads are based on it. I just didn’t make the connection until someone reminded me of it.
Aww, Pat Morita has died
Quite a few people died this week, not the least of which was Arthur (Artie) MacGrath, George Best and Pat Morita.
Given a choice of free DVDs what would you pick
I was in London last weekend, and I went shopping. I got to a store that sold movies. Interestingly enough, they only sold DVDs, which only goes to show how technology progresses – even HMV sells VHS tapes still.
Having purchased a DVD from them I was given an option to purchase a DVD at a really low price. The only two that stuck in my head were ‘The Punisher‘ and ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang‘. I had the unenviable benefit of seeing ‘The Punisher‘ once before on Sky Movies. All I can say is that it reminded me of the game ‘Far Cry‘, rather than the actual character of ‘The Punisher‘, as portrayed in the recent Garth Ennis punisher comic.
I chose ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang‘. Can you blame me? At the moment I’m enjoying it on the laptop as I type this entry.
If anyone cares, I’m using DVDidle Pro to watch the movie. It saves battery on my laptop, as well as allowing me to watch non region 2 DVDs, which is kind of important.
Happy thanksgiving folks
Just a general wave out to all those folks celebrating thanksgiving. I’m off to dinner myself later this evening.
SysQSort for sorting on PalmOS – optimizations
I never really read the documentation for the built in quick sort function for Palm OS. The only thing I ever looked at was how to swallow the extra parameter for the function. If I had read the documentation properly I would have noticed that it possesses several very handy optimizations that come (mostly) for free. The first is that it automatically uses an insertion sort if the number of records are ‘low’. This is very handy, as it means you don’t need to decided to use one algorithm over the other. It also swaps to an insertion sort if at a point in the sorting it discovers that the stack is about to be consumed completely, which means no mysterious application crashes due to the recursive nature of the quick sort.
The only real problem with it is that it, like all other versions of quicksort is that it’s unstable. If two items have the same key then they may appear on the output in a different order than they were input. Not a big pain really.
There’s NUMA perhaps we need NUPA
a minor addendum to the previous post, perhaps we need to work on Non Uniform Processor Access 🙂
Shock horror! hyperthreading not perfection in a box!
Yawn, an article on zdnet news tells us that hyperthreading isn’t all that for overloaded servers. All I have to say is duh! that’s not what it’s intended for. Mind you the benchmark was:
Ocks then detailed testing which showed this behaviour where a system thread — in this case one cleaning out blocks of disk cache memory — is running at the same time as worker threads. “With Intel HT technology, logical processors share L1 & L2 caches. As you would guess [this] behaviour can potentially trash L1 & L2 caches,” he said.
It looks like all this information came from a blog posting from a SQL server bod in Microsoft. Hyperthreading was never intended to be a replacement for multiple processors. It is evident from the examples cited that the systems in question were not designed with a two-tier processor model in mind, it treats both processors as if they were actual separate processors, and as such makes utterly bone-headed decisions in scheduling that cause massive performance degredation.
That and the fact that there is a thread that churns through vast amounts of memory deciding to store certain database pages out to disk. Ouch! That sounds a tad slow and broken.
Considering the blog entry and the two comments at the end, I’d have to say that yes, indeed, treating a multi-threaded processor like multiple processors is a bad thing to do.
Desiderata, by Max Ehrmann (1927 probably)
Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible, without surrender,
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even to the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons;
they are vexatious to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain or bitter,
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your own career, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs,
for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is;
many persons strive for high ideals,
and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection.
Neither be cynical about love,
for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment,
it is as perennial as the grass.
Take kindly the counsel of the years,
gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.
But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline,
be gentle with yourself.
You are a child of the universe
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be.
And whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life,
keep peace in your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
We need a daiko service
You’ve probably never heard of it before. It’s a japanese service called a daiko. What they do is drive you home in a taxi while the substitute taxi driver takes your car home. This means that you have the car in the morning. Kind of like the beer scooter service that was on offer about 2 years ago, but slightly different. double taxi fare would probably be the price tag, but to have the car in the morning (more like afternoon) priceless.