Comments are fixed

October 29, 2009 at 11:09 AMalex

There was a bug in 1.5 BE which prevented from posting comments on my posts. It is fixed now and you can send me your comments.

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Cloud storage as ultimate medium

August 20, 2009 at 10:24 AMalex

Beginning of this year I participated in the CloudSlam'09 conference with the paper devoted to a discussion on how the VM with interfaces to the Cloud can be designed and what are the major benefits of using the different approaches in core components of the virtual machine. You can access the full-text from this paper here.

It appears that alike discussions are moving with fast pace and they are going to be a main topic in the coming conference Storage Developer Conference 2009.

 

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Windows 7 Training Kit

August 3, 2009 at 10:14 AMalex

I'm leery of publishing some content which I didn't write on my own, but this one is worth mentioning. The Windows 7 RC Training Kit is invaluable resource for developer eager to learn the technology stack offered in the upcoming Windows 7: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=12100526-ed26-476b-8e20-69662b8546c1&displaylang=en This kit includes a lot of different materials which will help you jump on the coding with the new platform.

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128 bit operating system

July 26, 2009 at 4:46 PMalex

A few days ago, I finally started moving to 64 bit operating system and started thinking about 64 bit software components most of the time. This brought a set of problems with current components which I'm dealing with such as different utilities, drivers, and others. Do we have to have this kind of pain when we will be switching to 128 bit components? Do we ever need to think about 128 bit? Let me put forth some thoughts about it.

Currently, there are few places where we have exposed 128 bit constructs in order to alleviate those problems which we're currently facing. One of the most common is a need to identify something uniquely, and a structure called GUID was invented. It allowed us to overcome shortcomings of the auto-incremental ids or situations where we don't have control over the authority which can assign unique identifiers and guaranty their uniqueness to the appropriate probability. Another widely accepted application of 128 bit is encription where the long keys are increasing the strength of the ciphers. There are rudimentary appearencies of the 128 bit registers in processors such as IBM AS/370, and some recent developments from Sony related to physics simulations in consumer market devices.

Let's  think for a moment where we can use 128 bit systems, which would allow us to store and manipulate humongous amounts of information? Nowadays, we store all information in databases, and if Oracle's 128 developments will go mainstream, we can address even more abmiguous plans! Actually, Oracle does support 128 databases in terms of storage. Although, there are no 128 operating systems yet available on the market. Another trend is that it brings some possibility to store entire internet in your computer hard drive and being able to access and manipulate all this data momentarily!

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Scoping Usings

July 13, 2009 at 3:12 PMalex

 

Consider the following code, which results into an error when Figure class is an ambiguous reference to either N1 or N2 namespace:

using System;
using N1;
using N2;

namespace N1
{
    class Figure
    {
        public void  Method()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("N1::Figure.Method");
        }
    }
}

namespace N2
{
    class Figure
    {
        public void Method()
        {
            Console.WriteLine("N2::Figure.Method");
        }
    }
}

namespace ConsumeUsing

    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Figure f = new Figure(); // Error, Figure is an ambiguous reference.
            f.Method();
        }
    }
}

More...

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July 12, 2009 at 2:33 AMMy name

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July 10, 2009 at 12:41 PMMy name

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1 petaflop barrier

April 11, 2009 at 12:22 AMalex

Wow, some scepticists were mentioned 2010-12, but nobody predicted that in 2009 we are going to cross the 1 petaflop barrier in computations and the power available today with two supercomputers listed on www.top500.org where one is Roadrunner and another one is Jaguar. 1 petaflop is equivalent to thousand trillion floating point operations per second.

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Head in the cloud feet on the ground

March 17, 2009 at 9:26 AMalex

MSDN Events Unleashed - Windows Mobile and Visual Studio 2008 Debugging

March 23, 1:00 P.M., Chicago, IL

March 31, 1:00 P.M. Waukesha, WI

ArcReady - Architecting Applications for the Cloud

March 23, 9:00 A.M., Chicago, IL

March 31, 9:00 A.M., Waukesha, WI

Register Now for Microsoft Hosting Days

April 16, Chicago, IL
Please join the Microsoft Software + Services Partner Channel team for our annual Hosting Days series. If you are a newcomer, learn about opportunities to generate a recurring revenue stream.

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In search of prime numbers

February 16, 2009 at 1:48 PMalex

I've being intrigued to find fast algorithms for the prime numbers and the latest advances in this field, because, as you probably know, this is the problem which can be solved using several algorithms known since old times. Despite some shortcuts and several very huge numbers proved to be primes such as Mersenne's Numbers (GIMPS), several other algorithms include Rabin-Miller which is a standard primality test, ancient Sieve of Eratosthenes, and a bit faster Sieve of Atkin. The running time of these algorithms is a logarithmic function, where the Sieve of Atkin FFT implementation computes the result in O(k × log2 n). In reality, if you try to find the prime numbers on the latest computer hardware, it still takes a considerable amount of time and the problem is a good candidate for parallelization.

Posted in: Development

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