Lunchtime Semaphore

With all the recent multicore CPU, the bottleneck of processing is increasingly the IO from the disk. When compiling a bit project (especially linking), when processing gigabyte of data (now that loading up 4 GB in RAM is not a problem)…

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The Wisdom of Crowds is one of the latest book I’ve read that got me thinking. The general idea of the book is now quite well-known: combining the decision of a great number of people can reach an optimal choice more reliably than relying on an expert. But there are also several examples that are worth mentioning.

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That’s not the first time that I use PolSARpro, the free software from ESA for SAR polarimetry, but every time, the installation is a bit tricky. Here are the steps to get it running on an update Debian testing.

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OTB is a complex system, if you don’t believe it, look at the image here (click on it for a full view): Read the rest of this entry »

Just finished the book “Coders at work” from Peter Seibel where he interviewed some of the most accomplished coders/programmers in the art/craft/engineering/science of programming.

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I like the source code to look good, have uniform presentation, etc. Maybe I’m a bit particular, but I’m definitely not alone here: KWStyle is a great tool to check a number of files and signal the imperfections. This is especially valuable for project where several people are involved and all using different editors.

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A while back, I mention one of the feature of Git I was missing in Mercurial. It was the nice way git display a summary of the changes when you update. But that’s it, no more regrets!

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I don’t know what make me buy this book a few years back: I was not using Ruby, had no planning to go for web development and never heard of Rails before. But flipping through the book in the bookshop made me realized that there had been some big changes in the way the web was working: sure, hacking some html and javascript everything is possible… in theory. In practice, a limit is quickly reached where it becomes prohibitive to make changes. That’s where framework such as Rails comes in the picture.

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“Il semble que la perfection soit atteinte non quand il n’y a plus rien à ajouter, mais quand il n’y a plus rien à retrancher.”
Antoine de Saint Exupéry
(“It would seem that perfection is attained not when no more can be added, but when no more can be removed.“) Read the rest of this entry »

That was in 2007, I was a bit frustrated with the Design Patterns book and was looking for more concrete examples. Design Patterns, from Gamma et al.,  is a great book, but required more experience than what I had at that time to get the proper understanding on when to use a given pattern.

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