I am reminded of the Inmos Transputer.

That, as my older readers may still vaguely remember, was a freak processor in the eighties. It was designed for parallelism: Its fundamental design was for a computer with many transputers, not one with a single humongous blob. Each CPU was small, simple (the wikipedia page includes the complete instruction set) and linked to four other CPUs using bidirectional message-passing connections, and the design allowed vast CPU meshes with message routing and forwarding.

The thing that reminds me of the transputer is the way those links worked. When a Transputer received a message that had to be forwarded, it would prioritise communication over its own computation.

I am reminded of this because my mail is down. A great big failure happened during Christmas vacation. Then a routing mishap left me unable to take part in a video conference this morning. I am forced to prioritise my own programming over message passing, and it feels so good. Yesterday was great.

Tomorrow I shall apologise to borud about my unresponsiveness. But today, I plan to wallow in solitary hacking.

Actually I'll wait a few hours with publishing this. There's a chance someone might see it.

Snippets is a jabber/xmpp bot that periodically asks each team member what are you doing? and collects the answers on a web page. (more…)

A neighbour is noisily tearing down one of its office blocks. I'm sure a new unpretty office block will then be noisily built in its stead, so I bought a Bose QC15 to work in peace meanwhile.

Summary review: It handles the construction-related noise well, but it does really badly with respect to human noises such as a telephone conversation or a crying baby.

Both of the employees I spoke to in the Bose shop here in Munich were sloppy, arrogant and ignorant. Not a good combination. I walked out, and bought the headphones elsewhere.

One really good thing I learnt from working with Abhijit on Archiveopteryx is how to get quickly into the flow. Click, flow.

The basic pattern involves a good kind of task, and a good way to get to it. Both parts are vital. (more…)

Blog posting number one, from a typical silver bullet merchant (more…)

Although it was published on April 1, I have been told (by someone who was there) that it was intended to be taken seriously. I quoted it for the first time on April 5 (working on metis), and like to quote it still; this post is a bit of faux history with link targets for each truth (more…)