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February 2005 - Posts

Concurrency, Part 8 - Concurrency for scalability

Last time , I talked a bit about why you'd use concurrency in your application. Today I'd like to talk a smidge about using concurrency to achieve scalability. The first and most important thing that you have to understand when you decide to start improving Read More...
Posted Monday, February 28, 2005 1:25 PM by LarryOsterman | 18 Comments

Concurrency, part 7 - Why would you ever want to use concurrency in your application?

So I've spent a great deal of time talking about concurrency issues , but one thing I've avoided mentioning until now is when do you worry about concurrency. The first (and most common) time that concurrency matters occurs when your code lives in a DLL. Read More...
Posted Friday, February 25, 2005 11:55 AM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments

Concurrency - An aside

Sorry, I've got a massive headache today, and really don't feel up to writing the next item in the concurrency series, I should have something for Thursday (tomorrow's a day off for me :)). Meanwhile, I wrote this up a bit earlier during the series: My Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 22, 2005 10:43 AM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments

Concurrency, part 6 - Reference counting is hard :)

The other day , I talked about using reference counting as a way of ensuring object when enumerating a list containing objects. Reference counting is an incredibly useful, but incredibly dangerous technique. If you use it right, it can be a huge help, Read More...
Posted Monday, February 21, 2005 10:51 AM by LarryOsterman | 9 Comments

Concurrency, part 5 - What happens when you can't avoid lock misordering?

Yesterday , I talked about simple deadlocks. In general, deadlocks are caused by violating lock ordering. But what do you do if you can't avoid violating lock ordering? It does happen - in my experience, the most common place where this can occur is when Read More...
Posted Friday, February 18, 2005 8:32 AM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

Concurrency, Part 4 - Deadlocks

Yesterday I talked about critical sections and their use in protecting application data. But critical sections are like duct-tape - they hold applications together but they also have their dark side. A couple of commenters have touched on this, but the Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 17, 2005 10:06 AM by LarryOsterman | 14 Comments

Concurrency, Part 3 - What if you can't avoid the issue?

Yesterday , I talked about how you deal with concurrency issues by simply avoiding the concurrency issues - essentially by ensuring that your data is only ever accessed by a single thread. But, of course, there are times when this is unavoidable. For Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 16, 2005 12:10 PM by LarryOsterman | 12 Comments

Concurrency, Part 2 - Avoiding the problem

Yesterday's article on concurrency discussed the basic concepts of concurrency. Now I'd like to start talking about how you deal with concurrency... The first, and most important thing to realize about concurrent programming is that it's all about two Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 15, 2005 12:48 PM by LarryOsterman | 25 Comments

Concurrency, part one.

Last week, I mentioned I was going to start a series of articles on concurrency, here goes. I do feel a need to give a caveat: I'm sort-of winging it here - I know where I want to go on this one, but I'm not sure how I'm going to get there :) Please bear Read More...
Posted Monday, February 14, 2005 12:10 PM by LarryOsterman | 21 Comments

Larry gets taken to task on concurrency

In yesterdays blog post , I was taken to task, first by Bob Frankston , and then by Raymond Chen about comments I made, and I want to talk a bit about their comments. Here's the relevant sections: From Bob Frankston (yeah, the Bob Frankston, I'm honored): Read More...
Posted Friday, February 11, 2005 10:27 AM by LarryOsterman | 23 Comments

OT: The Woodinville Family Preschool hits 23 this month

Valorie just pointed out that the preschool that both our kids attended, Woodinville Family Preschool just hit 23 years old this month. The WFP is a cooperative pre-school located in a residential neighborhood off of Woodinville. It's run by Cecile Mielenz Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 10, 2005 10:30 AM by LarryOsterman | 0 Comments
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WHat's wrong with this code, part 9 (File Copy) - the answers

Wow, where to begin on this one. Lets start with the easy one, the simple coding error. Here it is: // // Account for data read. // dataBlock->dataLengthWritten->QuadPart += dataBlock->readLength; The problem with this is that 64bit math isn't Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 10, 2005 10:02 AM by LarryOsterman | 11 Comments

What's wrong with this code, part 9 - File Copy

Yes, it's time for another "What's wrong with this code"... Today's example of bad coding involves an attempt to speed up file copy operations by overlapping the read and write operations to the file. The theory is that the system can be reading from Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 09, 2005 9:33 AM by LarryOsterman | 29 Comments

Faster Syscall Trap redux

Raymond has a funny historical article about how Windows made system calls on 386 processors. What he left out was the 286 version of this story. Microsoft and Intel had a similar meeting to the one that Raymond described with the 386, but in that case, Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 08, 2005 10:45 AM by LarryOsterman | 12 Comments

Book Review: Find the Bug by Adam Barr

Several months ago, I mentioned Adam Barr 's book " Find the Bug ". I pre-ordered it from Amazon, but have only now finally finished reading it, so it took me somewhat longer to get this book review out :) This is the first book review I've done since Read More...
Posted Monday, February 07, 2005 1:28 PM by LarryOsterman | 13 Comments

Somewhat Offtopic: For parents/interested parties in the Seattle area.

The Northshore School District (where Valorie works) is currently investigating ways of improving the quality of education in NSD. From what Valorie's told me, they seem to be willing to put just about any options on the table, ranging from extending Read More...
Posted Monday, February 07, 2005 10:15 AM by LarryOsterman | 1 Comments
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Riffing on Raymond - FindFirst/FindNext

As I mentioned, I've been Riffing on Raymond a lot - Yesterdays post from Raymond got me to thinking about FindFirst and FindNext in MS-DOS. As Raymond pointed out: That's because the MS-DOS file enumeration functions maintained all their state in the Read More...
Posted Friday, February 04, 2005 11:07 AM by LarryOsterman | 16 Comments
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OMG, I've been slashdotted!

Wow. I came in and yesterdays (and Wednesdays) post were on the front page of /. I know that because I came in and found 40+ messages waiting moderation. My first thought was that it was comment spam. I looked at the first of them, realized it wasn't, Read More...
Posted Friday, February 04, 2005 9:47 AM by LarryOsterman | 10 Comments

Tipping Points

One of my birthday presents was the book " The Tipping Point " by Malcolm Gladwell. In it, he talks about how epidemics and other flash occurances happen - situations that are stable, and a small thing changes and suddenly the world changed overnight. Read More...
Posted Thursday, February 03, 2005 11:24 AM by LarryOsterman | 76 Comments
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Farewell to one of the great ones

Yesterday was the last day at Microsoft for David Weise . I've written about David (in passing) in the past , but never in detail. David started at Microsoft in 1986, when Microsoft acquired Dynamical Systems Research. Before founding DSR, he was a member Read More...
Posted Wednesday, February 02, 2005 10:42 AM by LarryOsterman | 44 Comments
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We've RI'ed!!!

We've RI'ed! ?? What on earth is he talking about ?? An RI is a "Reverse Integration". The NT source system is built as a series of branches off of a main tree, and there are two sets of operations that occur - when a change is made to the trunk, the Read More...
Posted Tuesday, February 01, 2005 12:03 PM by LarryOsterman | 50 Comments
 
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