Blog Archives

Functional programmers on Twitter

Posted on 2008-12-05 by Bryan O'Sullivan — 37 Comments ↓

Twitter has become quite the hotbed of chatter about functional programming over the past few months, as a substantial number of pretty well known FP people have either been present all along or have signed up recently and started following…

Posted in hardware, slice-o-life

Fedora 7 on a Thinkpad X60: not so hot

Posted on 2007-06-20 by Bryan O'Sullivan — No Comments ↓

I’ve been running test releases of Fedora 7, and lately the final release, for a number of months on my fairly new Lenovo Thinkpad X60. Here’s a brief summary of my experiences. I’ve been using Fedora since 0.92 (Taroon), and…

Posted in hardware, linux

A quick programmer’s look at NVIDIA’s CUDA

Posted on 2007-02-22 by Bryan O'Sullivan

I spent a while this evening reading through the documentation for the beta release of NVIDIA’s CUDA GPGPU system. My motivation for this was that nvcc, the CUDA compiler, is based on a code drop of the EkoPath compiler, which…

Posted in hardware, software

Sony Ericsson Z520a phone review

Posted on 2006-12-22 by Bryan O'Sullivan — No Comments ↓

I’ve had a Sony Ericsson Z520a phone for a little under a year now, and as it’s still widely available through cellular carriers, I thought I’d write up my experiences with it. I’m writing in part as a reaction to…

Posted in hardware

Refilling a missed TLB entry, now with special sauce

Posted on 2006-12-22 by Bryan O'Sullivan — No Comments ↓

Jeremy and Muli remind me that x86-class CPUs refill a missed TLB entry in hardware. That’s what I get for rambling at midnight! On these CPUs, the hardware walks the page tables directly when a miss occurs. The operating system…

Posted in hardware, software

The translation lookaside buffer

Posted on 2006-12-21 by Bryan O'Sullivan — 3 Comments ↓

In an earlier post, I briefly discussed the oprofile system profiler. I was going somewhere with that; here’s another step along the path. Modern CPUs that use virtual memory have to be able to turn virtual addresses into physical addresses…

Posted in hardware, linux

Make Linux happy with a modern laptop’s CD/DVD drive

Posted on 2006-12-12 by Bryan O'Sullivan — 9 Comments ↓

If you’re using a fairly modern laptop with an Intel chipset, the chances are that it has an Intel ICH7 I/O controller hub: $ lspci | grep -i ide 00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage…

Posted in hardware, linux

Linux on the Dell XPS M1210

Posted on 2006-10-18 by Bryan O'Sullivan — 22 Comments ↓

Since 2003, I’d been using a Thinkpad X31 for much of my work; it was the best laptop I’d ever owned, and was really the only one I used heavily over a long period of time. It had an irresistible…

Posted in hardware, software

The $10,000 laptop … almost

Posted on 2006-09-07 by Bryan O'Sullivan — 1 Comment ↓

I read in Bill Bumgarner’s blog that Dell has released a new model in its XPS line, the M2010. It’s not somethhing one could plausibly refer to as a laptop, due to its weight of 18.3lbs (8.3kg!) and 20“ screen.…

Posted in hardware

Hitachi redux

Posted on 2005-02-22 by Bryan O'Sullivan — No Comments ↓

I should have known better, but when I was incarnating the current noisy boat anchor that sits on my desk at home, I put a Hitachi hard disk in it. Not specifically one of the notorious IBM-era eat-your-data models, but…

Posted in hardware