Comments for Merbist

Comment on Books to read in 2012 – recommended to me by Twitter by David Parker

David Parker — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 05:29:17 +0000

Non-technical or just novels? As far as non-technical goes (but also not a novel), a great book is The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell. It was probably the best book I read this year, and one of the best books I’ve ever read. It’s good for anybody- not just people who want to design games. It’s not really technical, but it is about design and self-improvement (in my opinion).

Comment on Books to read in 2012 – recommended to me by Twitter by Matt Aimonetti

Matt Aimonetti — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 05:26:18 +0000

I enjoyed Daniel Suarez’s Daemon. Regarding the audiobook version of the Ender saga, I’m not too much of an audiobook type guy and I the are very seldom places where I can actually listen to audiobooks and not fall asleep (if my eyes aren’t busy, I just fall asleep o_O).

Comment on Books to read in 2012 – recommended to me by Twitter by Matt Aimonetti

Matt Aimonetti — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 05:23:21 +0000

Murakami really seems to be the one author I can’t skip. Thanks for the recommendations.

Comment on Books to read in 2012 – recommended to me by Twitter by Matt Aimonetti

Matt Aimonetti — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 05:22:27 +0000

Thanks, I’m glad to see some French books there as I haven’t read in French for a while. I also very much appreciate the quick description.

Comment on Books to read in 2012 – recommended to me by Twitter by Edgar Schmidt

Edgar Schmidt — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 05:11:39 +0000

Thanks for putting this list together in one place (maybe we should do it next year again . By the way, the Ender saga us absolutely wonderful on audiobook (you should be able to find it at your local library).

Let us know whether you like them or not after reading them.

(PS: you might want to check Daemon by Daniel Suarez – The first one-)

Comment on Books to read in 2012 – recommended to me by Twitter by Ol

Ol — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 04:46:11 +0000

Ada – Vladimir Nabokov. Because it’s my favorite Nabokov novel, an endless enchantment.
L’usage du monde / The Way of the World – Nicolas Bouvier. Some say it’s the best travel book ever.
Les jours de notre mort – David Rousset. An extremely powerful novel on the nazi camps, Rousset wrote it after his essay L’Univers Concentrationnaire,
DECLARE – Tim Powers. Coldwar + Supernatural = Wo-ah. Tim Powers weaves his web without changing actual history. Fascinating.
Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne – Impossible to describe. Written in the 18th but still radical, crazy and fun.

Comment on Books to read in 2012 – recommended to me by Twitter by Roel

Roel — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 00:23:17 +0000

I was about to recommend Kafka On The Shore by Haruki Murakami, but there are 2 Murakami books on the list already. Enjoy those first!

Comment on Developing a Curriculum by Tomas Ordoñez

Tomas Ordoñez — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 20:30:19 +0000

I never thought about it like this, starting with the end. It makes more sense. The same structure could be applied to other non-software segments. Thanks.

Comment on Data safety and GIL removal by Matt Aimonetti

Matt Aimonetti — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 22:05:07 +0000

Harald, Don. In Ruby, arrays have always been thread safe. JRuby changed that behavior and was followed by MacRuby and now Rubinius,

You can to blame people for having wrong assumptions, the point is that it is what a great large majority of Rubyists know and believe. Are they wrong? I don’t think it matters much since my point is just to explain the difference it makes when the GIL is removed.

As Don admitted, he also assumed that JRuby’s basic structures were thread safe, and that is exactly what I wanted to pointed out. Once you remove the GIL, very few things are thread safe unless made explicitly thread safe using locks, actors or whatever you fancy. And again, that’s not a big deal, but Ruby developers need to understand that so they can properly write their code.

Comment on Data safety and GIL removal by Don Park

Don Park — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 21:06:54 +0000

I want to echo what Harald said. The framing of the problem is misleading. To my knowledge, nowhere does ruby state that array access is thread safe. It is interesting to see the wildly different results from different VMs. Especially the jRuby output – i had assumed that jruby was magically thread safe. If we could say array access in ruby is thread safe, then the output would be 400,000 each time. The implication in the framing of the problem is that the coder is at fault.