Monday, February 18, 2008
M$ releases specs for Office binary file formats
Microsoft: Microsoft Office Binary (doc, xls, ppt) File Formats
It's about time. Now will Apple follow suit with their iWork file formats, or are those already published?
... 10 seconds of Googling later ... Yes, they are and they're XML.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Thursday, January 24, 2008
900,000 processes in Erlang
I started up an Erlang shell with a one million process limit. (erl +P 1000000)
I then fired up the multiple consumer / multiple producer problem I whipped up for my concurrency class, and asked for 400,000 consumers and 500,000 producers. It actually worked!
I tried it with about 100,000 processes first, and that was no problem, but I was skeptical that it would start nearly a million processes. But it appeared to work fine. My machine was getting really HOT and unhappy so I stopped it and haven't had time to prove correctness on that sample yet, but at a glance it looked like it was doing the right thing.
One of the nicest things about this was it was automatically using both cores in my MacBook Pro without having to write a single line of code to ask it to do that. Maybe that's not earth-shattering these days, but it's nice anyway. :-)
Geez, I'm still mesmerized by that Rick Nash goal from last week's post!
I want to try out my program on my graphics prof's 8-core Mac Pro and see how many processes I can start on it. Muuuuhahahaha!!!





