www.mcs.vuw.ac.nz/comp/Publications/CS-TR-02-9.abs.html

Apparently, this has been believed by many as a hoax, and so has been linked to the famous Alan Sokal hoax (the paper "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity").

However I think it’s more like: a serious article written in a tongue-in-cheek style and talking about an unusual topic.

Other authors i know who are writing about postmodern programming, are Larry Wall (Perl) and Richard Gabriel (new online book "Patterns of Software"). These days I am attempting to read the latter.

Richard Gabriel’s work on software patterns, and for that matter, all the work on software patterns for the last decade, has been tremendously influenced by a book supposedly on Architecture (!!!), by Christopher Alexander, called "The Timeless Way of Building".

Both C.Alexander and R.P.Gabriel spend a lot of time on an elusive concept they call "Quality", which I immediately connected to Robert Pirsig’s "Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (1976), a classic I finally read this year. The connection between the two is quite large (Pirsig’s book even more revolves around that "Quality" thing). It has to do with attempting to define the undefinable, in particular, those aspects of a thing that make it good and/or beautiful but that, trying to approach them from a formal standpoint, slip through our fingers.

There are a bunch of other interesting aspects (IMHO) in all of those texts.

Logo:

It comes with Gnome 2.8 and a 2.6 Kernel. The overall install was amazingly simple. Download it.

Was heute in der "Bild"-Zeitung steht, steht morgen ueberall. Vielleicht sollte man sich also mal genauer anschauen, was sie schreibt. Die kleinen Merkwuerdigkeiten und das grosse Schlimme.

link

Using Ruby and SQLite to create Linux clusters that take advantage of idle nodes and bypass expensive software solutions.

My friend Dave Clements always is game for a brainstorming session, especially if I’m buying the coffee. Recently, we met at the usual place and I explained my problem to him over the first cup. My office had a bunch of Linux nodes sitting idle and a stack of work lined up for them, but we had no way to distribute the work to them. Plus, the deadline for project completion loomed over us.

Over the second cup of coffee, I related how I had evaluated several packages, such as openMosix and Sun’s Grid Engine, but ultimately had decided against them. It all came down to this: I wanted something leaner than everything I’d seen, something fast and easy, not a giant software system that would require weeks of work to install and configure.

After the third cup of coffee, we had it: Why not simply create an NFS-mounted priority queue and let nodes pull jobs from it as fast as they could? No scheduler, no process migration, no central controller, no kernel mods—simply a collection of compute nodes working as fast as possible to complete a list of tasks. But there was one big question: was accessing an NFS-mounted queue concurrently from many nodes possible to do safely? Armed with my favorite development tools—a brilliant IDE named Vim and the Ruby programming language—I aimed to find out. link

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