December 2004 Archives

I've been using the new Google Scholar research tool a fair bit the last couple days. My favorite bit is that it will list all sources of a paper in a single search result item.

If I'm writing code at work, I usually only have an hour or two at best to work on any given project. And that's pushing it. During one of these surgical coding strikes I was in need of a Java Tree container and came across the Data Structures Library in Java. Easy to grasp, simple to use, and much recommended.

1060 just released version 2.0.1 of NetKernel. This is notable because of their new support for JMS.

Please note there is a new version of extractor ready for download. It includes a fix that converts ID3v1 genre codes to text. And also includes a quick and dirty Ruby script to generate 'genre' directories of albums using symlinks. This works great with Tivo HMO for Apache.

This blog entry has inspired me to make a few notes to work out some ideas through this rather meandering essay.

In very simple terms (read convenient simplification, see below), a queue is a serialized list of pending requests. And it is typically used to broker/filter/throttle requests to a naturally concurrent system behind it. What's interesting is that systems are typically compositions of other naturally concurrent (sub)systems. Turtles all the way down, if you will...