Bookmarks

These are really interesting/useful for explaining how the code that executes isn't the code you wrote as well as making you think about performance. A good example is the last one. As Mr Sutter explains, the swap from 80's architectures such as the VAX to modern systems was accompanied by a real change in speed of processor but without a large change in memory latency. As a result "elegant" algorithms that were right for 70s and 80s hardware are totally wrong for modern cache laden systems.

I stumbled over them a while ago, and then spent ages trying to find them again for a colleague. For some reason my google-fu was sadly deficient at work, but once sat back at home I found them within 15 minutes of trying. 

Herb Sutter @ NWCPP: Machine Architecture: Things Your Programming Language Neve

C++ and Beyond 2011: Herb Sutter - Why C++?

Bjarne Stroustrup: Why you should avoid Linked Lists - YouTube

Wordpress migration to a new system.

I've helped out a friend with their website recently, and it made me realise how difficult technology can still be for people who don't do this on a daily basis. Even smart people - she has a background as a professional scientist, artist and now successful businesswoman - can still require help with what on the surface appears to be the simple task of moving a website created on her mac using MAMP to the hosting company. 

Although it's not hard it requires an understanding of how things fit together so here's a script I came up with for migrating her production site. I practised by restoring a wordpress backup to a clean CentOS/RHEL 6.4 server in EC2. The information was gathered from lots of blog posts, the Wordpress Codex, Mysql docs and some trial and error.

Fast Stream Ciphers

A quick post. 

We have some home made cheapy frankenstorage, thats based around a low end celeron class desktop CPU. This is fine for moderate raid work, but recently I had to shovel a few terabytes between them, over the network. Making that run quickly enough led to a bit of experimentation with the speeds of the different ciphers.