Latest News from Joel Pobar

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

Mon, 26 May 2008 06:00:00 EDT

I was reminiscing about the good 'ol days tinkering with computers: Commodore 64s, GWBASIC, Turbo Pascal 5.0, DOOM and the Autoexect.bat config.sys hacking required to get it running on underprivileged 486s, Amiga 500s, 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.

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

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 10:00:00 EST

On to part two in the series of 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.

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

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 05:15:00 EST

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?