andrew carter

Today was the first day of OSCON for me. The keynote was good. Seems like the emphasis is on parallelism this year. Interesting how a theme seems to emerge each conference (and I don’t think it is intentional).Intel’s Threading Building Blocks looks like a great project. I hadn’t seen anything about it until today. I picked up the O’Reilly book as well. I like the idea of thinking in terms of tasks instead of threads. I think it is a much more natural programming model.Microsoft Research’s Simon Peyton Jones had a related presentation on applying transactional concepts to in-memory programming structures. The concepts are very similar to relational database methods. It seemed that this is limited to Haskell right now. Hopefully, MSR will expand it to C/C++ (and open source it).Two talks stood out for me. The first was Google Gears presented by Aaron Boodman. I know this wasn’t news for many out there but it was the first time I saw it in depth. It is much more interesting than I thought. The Javascript worker thread piece alone could be very useful. I think it would be very intriguing on devices like iPhone.The other talk I liked was about Puppet. Puppet is about solving the problem where a command is run in a loop remotely on a collection of servers. The next phase is to establish a repository for sharing configuration recipes. This is a critical piece to reduce the barrier to entry of setting up Puppet.