Joel Pobar

Joel Pobar's Weblog I was reminiscing recently about the good ‘ol days tinkering with computers: Commodore 64’s, GWBASIC, Turbo Pascal 5.0, DOOM and the Autoexect.bat config.sys hacking required to get it running on underprivileged 486’s, Amiga 500’s, broken Linux 1.0 kernel compiles, EGA video cards and more Sierra games than I can remember. Getting stuff running was hard. Understanding how stuff worked was heaps of fun. Connectivity to other likeminded communities was basically non-existent, so a great book on the topic of interest was like striking gold in Ballarat. It got me thinking though – if I were to start again in 2007, what would be the equivalent to learning about the flat memory address space of a Commodore 64, or breaking open a copy Borland’s new Turbo Pascal IDE? I had to ignore my first thought of being mindlessly h... (more)

The World's Eight Most Excellent Software Adventures - Part Two

Joel Pobar's Weblog On to part two in the series on The World's Eight Most Excellent Software Adventures. In this episode, we talk about scalability in the massive sense – à la Google style. Thousands of commodity machines, connected and waiting for your algorithm and data inputs, and the APIs that drive them. (Part One can be read here.) 2.  Massive Scalability Like any red blooded male, I love fast stuff. While most of my XY chromosomal counterparts are cheering for a roaring V8, I’m more in to seeing how fast I can flip bits and multiply binary numbers. The gaming gene... (more)

The World's Eight Most Excellent Software Adventures, Part Three

Joel Pobar's Weblog If we believe that dual/quad/octa/n-tuple cores + cache scaling + internals advancements is going to be the default way that processors are expected to scale, we must adjust the software appropriately to scale with it. When you start to think about how to solve the problem, an interesting meta-question arises: should we really be focusing on making sure client-side platforms scale? Here is Part 3 of Joel Pobar's engaging series on the world's Eight Most Excellent Software Adventures. Read Part One and Part Two. I love my dual core Intel Centrino Pro based Thinkp... (more)