Programmers Dojo

So... a "buddy" of mine got me this for Christmas this year.   I figure... hey, what the heck!  I should be able to get in trouble with this! It makes a nice little vehicle that works quite well.  I hope to turn this into a cool little telepresence rover but during the course of assembly I realized something... No "friend" should every give you something with pieces like this! I am seriously not built for handling pieces that small!

I had a buddy ask me about learning the Scheme programming language... so I figured I'd write a blog post about it! First a very short history. A long time ago (in 1958) there was born a language called Lisp.  Lisp is actually the second oldest high level language but that's a different post.  Lisp split into two main branches Common Lisp and Scheme. Common Lisp is quite large and has lots of features including a full OO system.  Scheme on the other hand is as stripped down as is practical.  For comparison the Common Lisp spec has ~1100 pages while the Scheme R5RS spec has 50 pages. That being said Scheme has low level primitives which allow you to build high level primitives. There are lots of great resources out there for learning Scheme and I'm going to list a few here. Textbooks: The Scheme Programming Language The Little Schemer The Seasoned Schemer Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs  - AKA: SICP Free textbooks: How to Design P

The  top500 list has been swamped by x86 machines over the last several years.  Anyone who knows me is aware that I am NO fan of the x86 ISA. Somewhat heartening is that the most recent list seen a resurgence in other architectures.  The Power architecture from IBM has been a fixture on the list for a long and is still a strong contender even though it has fallen to No. 12 from No. 9 last time and No. 1 in November of 2007. A Sparc machine has captured the No. 1 place this year and is actually as powerful as the the No. 2 through No. 6 systems combined. The Chinese MIPS based Loongson processor is starting to make some noise and the Dawning 6000 is reported to eventually reach a Petaflop in computing power. One other note is that an increasing number of machines in the top500 list rely heavily on GPUs.  The No. 2 machine on the current list, the Chinese Tianhe-1a machine, is comprised of 14,336 Intel Xeon processors and 7,168 Nvidia Tesla GPUs. Now I guess we just hav

Programmers are artisans.  We are masters of tools... or at least should be. I see many programmers fail to focus on their tools.  The programmer himself is the most important part of the equation right?  Well, yes, but that doesn't mean tools cannot amplify his or her abilities. Even the worlds greatest carpenter will be hampered with substandard tools. There are a set of common tools that every developer should be familiar with.  I am going to focus on C/C++ Unix development but this list is easily translated into other environments. 1. Your editor. This is where you are going to spend most of your time.  On Linux you have a many choices but every developer should know one of Emacs or Vi.  I'm an Emacs guy so I won't talk about Vi much, and besides... there is nothing your OS can do that my Emacs can't. :) Editors are highly sophisticated programs with huge arrays of features.  The better you are at running your editor the more time you will save yourself i

Now you don't just have to imagine! http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~galles/visualization/Algorithms.html

Jeff Vitter is the provost and executive vice chancellor and the Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas. I just stumbled across his page and found a great book on external memory algorithms and data structures external memory algorithms and data structures. IE: algorithms and data structures to use when your dataset is too large to fit in main memory. He has many other papers on his site including several on external memory graph algorithms. Here's the link... http://www.ittc.ku.edu/~jsv/Papers/catalog/