olivier deheurles

It is not always easy to find time to learn new things and the best time I have found is the London transport: like lots of people I spend between 1 hour and 1 hour and a half per day in the tube and I’m trying spend this time intelligently, ie. not playing angry birds.

If you think about it, that’s 6-8 hours per week you  can spend learning new stuff! That’s a lot…

Books

Computer science books are generally massive beasts and I do not want to carry them in the tube, I generally use my iPad instead. GoodReader and DropBox is my preferred combo: I just organize my books within the DropBox folder on my PC and then synchronize GoodReader with the book folder, works very well over Wi-Fi or even 3G.

Videos

I watch lots of videos, my preferred sources are:

• Channel9: videos are available in mp4 directly so you do not need to do any conversion to put them on iPhone or iPad
• MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW): you can access directly lots of MIT undergraduate and graduate courses for free and some of them are available in video format. Example: Introduction to Algorithm contains 25 lectures, all available in mp4 format.
• iTunes U: you have probably already used iTunes, but maybe not iTunes U. Instead of browsing music or videos you can access courses from the best Universities. Example: Programming Massively Parallel Processors with CUDA, 16 lectures on NVidia CUDA. iTunes U is really friction less: subscribe to course, synchronize with iPhone/iPad, done.

When I find videos which are not in mp4 format I use MediaCoder video encoder: it’s free, easy to use and configure, it has templates for iPhone and iPad screen resolutions, can use your GPU (fast) and support batch encoding: you setup several videos to encode and MediaCoder will process them one after the other automatically.

About one month ago I watched a video describing the architecture of LMAX (Financial Exchange) and realized that I did not know that much about hardware. I made some researches and found really good documents, blogs and videos and I thought it may be a good idea to share my findings…

First I would recommend to have a look at LMAX - How to Do 100K TPS at Less than 1ms Latency presented by Martin Thompson and Michael Barker, in about one hour it gives a pretty good overview of the challenges you have to face when building a HPC system with high level of contended concurrency. Comments below the video also worth having a look to get more details on there architecture.

Then there is an excellent paper from Ulrich Drepper (Red Hat): What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory. It presents current commodity hardware architectures focusing on :

• RAM - don’t be afraid by this first part, you can skip most of it,
• CPU Caches, cache coherency protocols, etc. – very interesting and important to understand too
• Virtual memory
• the second half of the document focuses on “what programmers can do” (must read) and “Memory performance tools” (relevant if you are working on Linux systems).

Paul E. McKenney, working on Linux kernel, is writing a book on parallel programing: Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It? I won’t give a feedback yet because I’ve not yet finished it yet but I can already say that it’s really worth reading.

I have read as well several white papers from Herb Sutter (one of the C++ big names), you can find them on his web site, in his books and articles section. If you prefer videos there is “Machine Architecture: Things Your Programming Language Never Told You” video on YouTube with corresponding pdf slides.

Interested by parallel programming and wants to learn more about wait-free, lock-free, obstruction free, etc.? If you are, you should really go on Dmitry Vyukov’s website 1024cores and read the introduction and articles in order, they are pretty quick to read but very informative. You will find as well lots of algorithms and data structures for parallel programming – MUST READ. You should subscribe to it’s blog as well.

All documents and videos above are presented from the perspective of Linux/C++/Java but are very relevant even for a Windows/.NET developer.

Now if you want to learn more about Windows and .NET I would recommend:

• Joe Duffy’s blog and book are must read for parallel programming on Windows,
• Interested by internals of .NET Garbage collector? Maoni Stephens, working on the GC, presents latest evolutions of the .NET 4 GC in a Channel9 video, read here blog for more details.
• Patrick Dussud, one of the Microsoft Technical Fellows, and one of the CLR founders and chief architect of the .NET Garbage Collector, has some videos on the .NET GC internals here and here. You will notice that I’m not the only French guy with an horrible English accent ;)
• I’ve downloaded as well the open source code of the .NET platform (Rotor). You should really have a look. For instance you can find the C++ source code of the execution engine (\sscli20\clr\src\vm) and the corresponding BCL code in .NET (\sscli20\clr\src\bcl\system). Did you ever wondered how .NET objects are stored internally? Where is the implementation of “extern” methods for the BCL classes? It’s there! The document Object Internals is a good companion to start browsing this large code base.
• CLR: Vance Morrison blog and Jeffrey Richter’s blog and book CLR via CSharp
• Windows internals: Mark Russinovich, Technical Fellow and Windows Kernel guru, has a good video “Inside Windows 7” on Channel9 and his book Windows Internals, the absolute reference for Windows’ OS core.

Other interesting stuff to read:

• Ring Buffer implementations (CPU Cache friendly + optimisations): MCRingBuffer and LibertyQueue white papers,
• False sharing: here and here (Herb Sutter strikes back)

Last thing to say: I’ve been reading quite a lot lately and it’s pretty hard to keep track of what you have read, what you would like to read, etc.

• I’ve found Read It Later service extremely useful: it integrates with your browser  (Chrome for me), a single click and you have added a document to your list of stuff to read and your mobile devices (iPhone, iPad for me) get synchronized automatically. It works quite well for HTML pages.
• For PDFs on Ipad/iPhone, GoodReader is a must. Note that it can connect to your DropBox if you have one, very useful to share documents between devices.

Enjoy…

After spending quite a lot of time arranging and completing my book list, I asked myself if there was not a WordPress plug-in which can manage this for me. After 5 minutes on google I found not just what I was looking for, but really better. The plug in is named Now Reading and have the following functionalities:

• add books by ISBN and automatically retrieve book informations on Amazon (great),
• provide a library page visible on the blog,
• fully manageable book list in WordPress administration section,
• I can edit reviews of the books, rate them
• manage list of read, currently reading and planned books.

The library is available here and in the menu on the right.

I’m starting to make a list of books. I want this list to be easily accessible so it will not be hosted in a blog post but in separate page.

EDIT : My book list is also accessible from the link in the top right corner of the blog.