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sandpile.org -- The world's leading source for pure technical x86 processor information.

I had to laugh when I tried an obvious Google search to see what would come up to help answer the question I set in [52.223] LLP Practical #00

Why/if Low-Level Programming is an integral part of a Computer Science (or related) degree?

Guess which site what was the first hit with Google Search: Why low level programming? Sweet!

Ars Technica: Book review: Expert C Programming: Deep C Secrets (8/99)

Outside of resources like Eric Raymond's Jargon File, it's hard for a 'net newbie to really soak up the kind of old-school hacker lore that still wafts through the back alleys of the 'net. If you were to hang out on USENET long enough, you might pick up some of this stuff, but it's rapidly being diluted as the 'net becomes a place for all types of attitudes, backgrounds, education levels, etc. This in itself isn't bad; indeed, it's a sign of healthy growth. What's tragic, however, is the fact that such folklore has been misappropriated by script-kiddies and overzealous Linux users who came late to the party yet insist on pretending as if they've always been here. Nevertheless, there are ways to get an authentic taste of the kind of spirit that permeated the programming community in earlier times.

Prior to teaching 2nd and 3rd year students [52.225] CAD... with...

... the recommended text book - Computer Organisation & Design: The Hardware/Software Interface - by Patterson & Hennessy for the course lecture notes ;-)! Joking apart, the course text book* is essential reading IMHO. No doubt second-hand copies will be available from last year's students. The University Bookshop have many copies available too.

I taught a final year honours class using the first text book that H & P wrote. Ars Technica: Book review: Computer Architecture: a quantitative approach (9/99) says it better than I:

If anyone is qualified to talk about computer architecture, it's David A. Patterson and John L. Hennessy. Patterson was at the vanguard of the RISC movement; he published a number of seminal RISC papers and even coined the term RISC. He was the man behind the design of Berkely's RISC-I computer, the machine on which Sun's SPARC was based. His other contributions include leadership of the team that invented RAID, as well as research into computation using networks of workstations (NOW). John Hennessy was also one of the leaders of the RISC movement in the early 80's. He worked on the Stanford team that developed the MIPS architecture, and he later went on to found MIPS Computer Systems, which eventually merged with SGI. If you're a member of the ACM and/or you have access to their Digital Library, I'd recommend doing a search for either of these authors and reading some of their other published work.

The summer before teaching that final year honours class I was in the USA on vacation. A couple of weeks before flying out I e-mailed Profs Patterson and Hennessy in the hope that I could see them to discuss their courses and their textbook. I was honoured, and not a little surprised, that they both agreed to meet me whilst I was in California so I duly visted them at Berkeley and Stanford respectively. I took along my own copy of the hardback first edition of their book. It's now probably one of only a few that have been signed personally by both authors!! It has now pride of place in my bookcase ;-)

The Register: Fonts, face-tagging and false frequencies

AMD get plenty of opprobrium for its new naming convention:-

"I make no judgement about whether the comparison is fair or accurate, but I do take exception, (as will many many more people), at being told lies by marketing bunnies. AMD were more than happy to crow about clock speed when they reached 1GHz first, but now they tell us, ( 9 months later), that processor speed does not matter!" writes Mark Newman.

And on a related metric: MIPS - Meaningless Indicator of Performance used by Salesmen.

The Register: Intel to ship 802.11a wireless LAN kit in 2002

Intel has aggressive plans to use the 802.11 wireless connectivity specification as the basis for local area networking, with product roll-outs during what's left of 2001 and throughout 2002.

The Register: AMD confirms QuantiSpeed marchitecture slogan

We can confirm AMD's attempt to prevent punters from assuming that its chips are much slower than Intel's because its Athlon XP clock speeds are rather lower than Pentium 4 megahertz ratings will indeed be called QuantiSpeed.

I wonder why AMD trademarked the phrase Intimate Integration. Other bizarre phrase include Powerfully Different, Upgrades Made Easy, and What it Takes!

Guess what's going into my CAD lecture tomorrow ;-)

PS Intel attempted to trademark AMD name!

At the first lecture of the new Semester I succumbed to a little rant about academic dishonesty. One of my students (thanks David) alerted me to this great Slashdot | Cooperation in CS Education? thread in response to this question:

"The college I currently attend, like most colleges, is on a form of 'Academic Honesty Policy'. It has been explained to me in various ways, but mostly it boils down to: If you catch someone's code out of the corner of you eye, that's cheating, and you need to come up with your own 'original' ideas. I'm a CS major, so I write a lot of code, and I imagine when I get in the work force, I'll be writing a lot more. The difference is, in the workplace, I'll be in a team of people. I won't have control and I'll have personnel and political issues to deal with in addition to my job. So far I've had one class that actually demonstrated this principle, and I'm pretty much finished all my CS courses. I know the college has to do this so they can somehow grade 'my' code and assess my performance. Isn't there a better way? A way that students can be taught to work as a team yet still be able to tell who is pulling their own weight and who is not?"

There's some gems of advice/opinion/info in some of the posts in that thread. Must let me colleagues know.

developerWorks: Web architecture | XML zone : An introduction to RSS news feeds

RDF Site Summary (RSS) is catching on as one of the most widely used XML formats on the Web. Find out how to create and use RSS files and learn what they can do for you. See why companies like Netscape, Userland, and Moreover use RSS to distribute and syndicate article summaries and headlines. This article includes sample code that demonstrates elements of an RSS file, plus a Perl example using the module XML::RSS.

Thanks for the link Don!

In Brian Carnell & Knowledge Management, Seth I am sure speaks for most of using Conversant when he says:

I have to admit to being a little jealous of Brian Carnell, but mostly I'm just very impressed. He's just one man, but he's built a collection of ultra-high quality, content-rich web sites with Conversant. In fact, it's hard to believe that one person has done all that.

I would like to aspire to Brian's capabilities with Conversant and I am determined to improve www.smeed.org since he has shown us how much untapped potential there really is in Conversant.

In fact, I'm toying with the idea of setting some student project(s) that somehow uses Conversant to its full potential. I must also polish off the http://www.arspentia.org site and prepare it for the next set of group projects in CAD - Macrobyte willing.

On the AppleScript - Web Services page, Dave [Scripting News] gets the credit he deserves:

Web Services applications communicate using XML-based protocols, such as XML-RPC (Remote Procedure Calls) and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol). The SOAP protocol is a working standard defined by the WC3, an Internet standards organization. XML-RPC is a UserLand Software open specification.

Although my RSS formatted weblog view of the most recent weblog day is working OK, the Advanced Query Page generated version isn't. Bummer! I'm not aware of changing anything - other than documenting how I set it up - so I'll need to investigate. Aside: I've noticed that documenting code sometimes breaks it ;-)

If nothing else my debugging of this should help to contribute to the F.C. Support: RSS Generation in Conversant documentation effort.