I just listened to the November 16, 2009, issue of the BBC podcast called “Peter Day’s World of Business“. It is a rerun (in memoriam) of an interview with business professor Russell Ackoff, which was originally published in 2007.
Tag: podcast commentary
Joel Spolsky: You cannot program parallel in C, period
I found this quote in Stackoverflow Podcast #68 quite funny in its extreme dislike of parallel programming in C…
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Marketing a Paper Magazine with a Podcast
I just found a fairly interesting podcast that offers a nice example on how do marketing for paper-based magazines using digital ephemeral technology. The ancient warfare magazine has a podcast that accompanies each issue, where a set of history buffs discuss around the theme of the current issue of the magazine.
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CouchDB: A Parallel Program in a Parallel Language
I just listened to another Floss Weekly show, Number 36 where they interviewed Jan Lehnard of the CouchDB project. CouchDB is very interesting, in that it is a database designed for replication, redundancy, and thus massive parallelism. It was initially written by Damien Katz on his own, but now it is an Apache Foundation project sponsored by IBM. The most interesting thing is that Damien decided in 2006 to rewrite the C++ prototype he had in Erlang, and did so in just a few months if I understood my Erlang friends right. So here we have a really good parallel program written in a true parallel language.
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DNS: Hardware Accelerator Time!
In Episode 157 of Security Now,Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte discuss the recently discovered security issues with DNS. In particular, the cost of making a good fix in terms of bandwidth and computation capacity. Fundamentally, according to Steve, today’s DNS servers are running at a fairly high load, and there is no room to improve the security of DNS updates by for example sending extra UDP packets or switching to TCP/IP. As this theoretically means a doubling or tripling of the number of packets per query, I can believe that. The “real solutions” to DNS problems should lie in the adoption of a truly secured protocol like DNSSEC. As this uses public key crypto (PKC), it would add a processing load to the servers that would kill the DNS servers on the CPU side instead…
FLOSS Weekly: Drizzle: Aggressive Push to Multicore
I listened to episode 35 of FLOSS Weekly that interviewed Brian Aker, creator of the Drizzle fork from MySQL. As most recent episodes of FLOSS Weekly, it is pretty good technical material. What I found interesting was the technical vision behind Drizzle, and how they are aggressively going for quite wide multicore hosts.
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BBC Documentary: On the Trail of Spammers
If you are looking for a good popular introduction to what spam is and how it works, the BBC World Service Documentary Podcast has a very good documentary up right now. I cannot find a direct link, but go to the overview page and then download “Doc: Assignment – On the trail of spammers 17 Jan 2007”. Enjoy!
Hardware Debug Support & LinuxLink PodCast
The TimeSys Embedded Linux Podcast (also called LinuxLink Radio) is a nice listen about embedded computing using Linux. Sometimes they are a bit too open-source centric, though, and ignore very good tools that live in the classic commercial world. One such example is the recent episode 20 on debugging tools, where they totally ignore modern high-powered hardware-based debugging.
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