- What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic by David Goldberg. Eh, I knew it from my first Fortran program that floats (the standard 32 bit precision using REALs in that language) will give you rounding precision. And they accumulate pretty well! Very interesting reading, though.
- Practical Common Lisp: my struggling to become good at this (for me, and for now) weird language. Very good till this point.
- Language Support for Lightweight Transactions, by Tim Harris and Keir Fraser. I am always interested in concurrency and distributed computing, so this is a must after MSDN Magazie January's End Bracket, by Joe Duffy
- Speaking of parallel computing, I learned a lot at work on current standards for grid computing. Basically, we are building a computing cluster, and two different projects come into the scene: openMosix and MPI (the second one is the protocol choosen for Windows Server 2003 CCE, too). The two use two very different approaches, each with his own drawbacks and strenghts. I want to study some more, especially on the openMosix front, and then expose here what I learned and my own ideas.
- And, last but not least, Hackers and Painters, by Paul Graham. Very interesting and stimulating reading, made even more stimulating by the fact that I agree with many of his opinions, but I totally disagree with many others. I find it difficult to understand how an open minded persons could fall trapped in the same mistakes he points out in other people. But maybe Paul wrote some of his pages only to please an audience.. He was going to sell his book, after all. I want to discuss this topic more deeply in the future; it surely deserves a post.
Copyright 2020 - Lorenzo Dematte