- Review of "The Little Book Of Semaphores" by Allen B. Downey
The Little Book of Semaphores is a free PDF. Whenever I write code to synchronize multiple threads, I always think, "There must be some method to this." I've been warned by the popular adage, "Any non-trivial multithreaded program has [ ... ]
- Against ResourceWarnings in Python 3
Update: Nick Coghlan has changed my mind, see our comment thread for the explanation. Allow me to grumble. Consider this function from Python 3.2.3's socketmodule.c: /* Deallocate a socket object in response to the last Py_DECREF(). [ ... ]
- Review of "The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen
Patience, grasshopper—the book does not promise well, but rewards your effort in the end. We spend the first few chapters with Chip, a po-mo literature professor at some small college. Franzen wastes our time with tired tropes: [ ... ]
- Python's swap is not atomic
I rewrote PyMongo's connection pool over the last few months. Among the concurrency issues I had to nail down was, if a thread is resetting the connection pool as another thread is using the pool, how do I keep them from stepping on each [ ... ]
- Cetonia Aurata
I'd like to share with you this gorgeous photo from Wikipedia: source
- Review of "Version Control with Git" by Jon Loeliger
Git is the most powerful and conceptually elegant source code management system I've used. (Perhaps Mercurial rivals it? I haven't used Mercurial.) But it seems to be in a state of arrested development. Many commands commonly used in [ ... ]
- Review of Seamus Heaney's translation of "Beowulf"
I'm going to gradually repost some reviews I wrote on Goodreads; hope you find them interesting. I have three things to say about Beowulf. 1) The ballad itself is not only semi-foundational to English-language literature, but [ ... ]
- Review of "Being Geek" by Michael Lopp
I'm always late to the party, but here's my review of Michael Lopp's 2010 book Being Geek. A supposed career handbook, with little relevance to my career. The author has worked at large corporations (including Netscape) and small [ ... ]
- In Response to "Stop Looking For A Technical Co-founder"
Alexey Komissarouk, apparently a very savvy CS senior at UPenn, has written Stop Looking For A Technical Co-founder. He's criticizing the phenomenon that I've found epidemic in NYC: some business-type, I'll call him Mr. MBA, usually [ ... ]
- I'm An Award-Winning Photographer!
