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PHP

Submission + - Develop multitasking applications with PHP V5

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Many PHP developers believe that because standard PHP lacks threading capabilities, it's impossible for a practical PHP application to multitask. Not true... PHP doesn't support threading in the way other languages like the Java programming language or C++ do, but the examples in this article show that PHP can exploit in-process multitasking and has more potential for speed-ups than many realize.
Programming

Submission + - Building a (fast) Wikipedia offline reader (softlab.ntua.gr)

Submitted by
ttsiod
ttsiod writes: "An internet connection is not always at hand... I wanted to install Wikipedia on my laptop to be able to carry it along with me on business trips... After trying and rejecting the normal (MySQL-based) procedure, I quickly hacked a much better one over the weekend, using open source tools. Highlights: (1) Very fast searching (2) Keyword (actually, title words) based searching (3) Search produces multiple possible articles, sorted by probability (you choose amongst them) (4) LaTEX based rendering for Mathematical equations (5) Harddisk usage is minimal: space for the original .bz2 file plus the index built through Xapian (6) Orders of magnitude faster to install (a matter of hours) compared to loading the "dump" into MySQL — which, if you want to enable keyword searching, takes *days*. Enjoy!"
Internet Explorer

Submission + - attn: web developers, re: internet explorer 7 (krisgale.com)

Submitted by
kris gale
kris gale writes: "after months of second-guessing, i called microsoft to demand any and all clear information about what specific changes were made to the javascript engine in ie7 compared to ie6, because i've been getting some very strange phone calls from current and past clients lately... they had nothing to offer but the technet and msdn forums. after scouring those only to find a myriad of posts expressing issues in concert with my own, i spent this entire past weekend nailing down a few work-arounds to several critical bugs ie7 introduces to the web-at-large."
The Internet

Submission + - visual search engine 1

Submitted by
kwarren
kwarren writes: "I made this search engine that's completely visual (the is no text field to enter any sort of query). It attempts to profile a user based on how they rate certain images, and then find past searches that are most similar and gives related results. A lot of people say it reminds them of that 20q.net game; some times it's shockingly accurate, and sometimes it's unimpressive. It definitely shows improvement — some friends and I were trying to search for random topics, and it was pretty common for irrelevant results the first search, but some times as soon as the second or third search relevant results would appear withing 4 or 5 *ratings*. It checks both positive and negative relationships, and some times seems to have built a category using deductive reasoning. It's a pretty cool idea, but doesn't seem 100% accurate, so I'm putting it here for input and feedback. Thanks! -kpw"
Databases

Submission + - Data fragmentation effects in mixed load database (targeted.org)

Submitted by
Dmitry Dvoinikov
Dmitry Dvoinikov writes: "This article discusses the effects that data fragmentation has on the database performance under a mixed load. The experiment on a PostgreSQL database that follows the theoretical part yields some numbers and graphs and shows how bad fragmentation is for I/O and shared buffer pool.

http://www.targeted.org/articles/databases/fragmen tation.html"
Databases

Submission + - SQL SERVER - Data Warehousing Interview Questions (sqlauthority.com)

Submitted by
pinaldave
pinaldave writes: "I have tried to accommodate all of them in last post in the series. I hope this series is helpful to all candidates who are seeking job as well interviewers. I have combined all the questions and answers in the one PDF which is available to download and refer at convenience. http://blog.sqlauthority.com/2007/07/29/sql-server -data-warehousing-interview-questions-and-answers- complete-list-download/"
The Internet

Submission + - What ever happened to Web engineering?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Web pages have become a major functional component of the daily lives of millions of people; you, the Web developer, are in a position to make that part of everyone's lives better. Does it ever occur to you that today's Web developers could learn a thing or two from traditional computer programming? What we have today is a generation of Web designers and developers who are attempting to build increasingly sophisticated Web sites without reference to the best practices of software engineering, which this article explores.
Intel

Submission + - Intel release threading library under GPL 2

Submitted by littlefoo
littlefoo writes: Intel Software Dispatch have announced the availability of the Threading Building Blocks (TBB) template library under the GPL v2 with the run-time exception — so this previously commerical only package is now open for all the use, whether for open-source projects or commerical offerings (although they are explicitly encouraging open source use). The interface is more task-based then thread-based, but with a somewhat different view of things than, e.g. OpenMP. From the Intel release

"Intel® Threading Building Blocks (TBB) offers a rich and complete approach to expressing parallelism in a C++ program. It is a library that helps you leverage multi-core processor performance without having to be a threading expert. Threading Building Blocks is not just a threads-replacement library. It represents a higher-level, task-based parallelism that abstracts platform details and threading mechanism for performance and scalability."
Intel

Submission + - Intel open-sources multicore programming toolkit (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by Doctor Memory
Doctor Memory writes: Intel has recently open-sourced their previously closed-source TBB 2.0 (Thread Building Blocks) C++ library. The library provides parallel algorithm templates for "task-based parallelism", emphasizing logical tasks instead of physical threads. The web site (osstbb.intel.com) hosts an FAQ, a forum link, and a download page to get the latest version of the source. Licensed under GPLv2, Intel will continue to sell a commercial version of the library which will include engineering support. There's a more in-depth overview over at Ars Technica.
Operating Systems

Submission + - VMWare Record/Replay Demo (podtech.net)

Submitted by
pg--az
pg--az writes: "ScobleShow has a video of a Windows-Notepad-scribble being replayed by "last night's build" of VMWare Workstation 6, the impressive thing being of course that the record/replay is of the entire operating system."
Programming

Submission + - Secure Programming: the Seven Pernicious Kingdoms (earthweb.com)

Submitted by
jammag
jammag writes: "This chapter-length excerpt from a new book, Secure Programming With Static Analysis talks about what the authors call "The Seven Pernicious Kingdoms" (the term comes from biology). The "kingdoms" are both generic and context-specific defects in programming, ranging from API abuse to Encapsulation. The authors' thesis is summed up by a quote from Henry Petroski: "Success is foreseeing failure.""
Google

Submission + - Google Overhauls Google Docs (blogspot.com)

Submitted by AccioBrain
AccioBrain writes: The Stormin Mormon reviews the new update to Google Documents and Spreadsheets. He writes,

I do not believe that Google will ever replace MS Word. It's clearly not their goal... But for a lot of the work that is currently being done using MS Word or Excel (or even OpenOffie Writer or Calc) Google Docs and Spreadsheets is not merely a free replacement, but an actual improvement.

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