August 2006
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Here are the articles that were published in August 2006.
Probing Encarta 2007
published: Thu, 17-Aug-2006
Last time I was visiting Microsoft, the organizers for the event I was
attending had provided a trip to the company store, together with a
voucher allowing us to spend up to $120 on software and hardware.
Before you start thinking that's way too little to buy anything of
import, realize that the Microsoft Company Store has deep discounts.
Amongst other things, I picked up a copy of
Encarta
Premium 2007 for $20. I like Encarta (I'd bought my previous
version of it at the company store too), but this time, it came with a
little frisson. If you like algorithms (duh, that's why
you're here) and you program in Visual Studio 2005 and .NET 2.0 and
want a little fun, read on.
Read more...
My First Play
published: Thu, 17-Aug-2006
I was ferreting around in the basement this morning looking for
something completely different, when I came across the programme and a
photo of the cast of the very first play I was in. Oh, man! This one
takes me back. Waaaay back. It was just before my seventeenth
birthday, I was in the Lower Sixth at Ernest Bailey Grammar School in
Matlock (that's in Derbyshire, England for my non-UK readers, and for
my American readers it's pronounced "darby-shih"), and I had a part in
The Diary of Anne Frank. So, be warned: it's more of a personal post
this time, and likely to only be of interest to my fellow schoolmates
who were in it.
Read more...
Lock-Free Linked List (Part 3)
published: Sun, 13-Aug-2006
So
last
time, just like a cheesy Saturday morning movie serial, I left you
hanging, wondering how I was going to solve the insoluble in C#. The
insoluble issue in this case is the fact that we have two items of
information that will vary independently of each other in different
threads, but that we need to see as a unit when we write new values of
them using CAS. And, of course, the size of both items is more than
the size we can CAS.
Read more...
Lock-Free Linked List (part 2)
published: Tue, 1-Aug-2006
Last time in this series of articles on lock-free linked lists we
pointed out some of the issues we needed to solve in order to have any
chance of implementing such a data structure. These were to do with
deleting nodes from the list: the first being that deleted nodes could
not be disposed or reused since other threads may still be using them,
and the other was the problem of inserting a node after a node that
was just about to be deleted. I ended with the subtle hint that we
would have to add some extra fields to our node class.
Read more...