Thinking Parallel

Before I start, let me say a warm thank you to all the people who have read this blog over the past few month, have left their comments, dropped me encouraging notes or mentioned me in their blogs: I really appreciate your support, thank you!

Getting back to the subject of this post, I have read some interesting articles this week that I would like to share with you, some related to parallel programming, some not so much:

• Trip Report: Ad-Hoc Meeting on Threads in C++ – a very interesting look into the future of threading and C++. Contains interesting bits on a possible memory model, threading APIs and also on exceptions and threads. Very worth reading, if you are interested in some of the deeper issues involved with threading.
• I Love C++ Exceptions – Scott makes a convincing case for using exceptions in C++ – particularly interesting since I have just blogged about exceptions and OpenMP last week.
• via Lambda the Ultimate:Good Ideas, Through the Looking Glass – an essay by Niklaus Wirth (the creator of e.g. Pascal), where he looks back at some ideas from the field of computer science that turned out to be not so great.
• and last but not least found on Presentation Zen: Free Hugs – a very inspiring video to remind us about the really important things in life.

Although many of you probably already know him, I also want to add Steve Yegges Blog to this list. He has not posted last week, but I just discovered his blog recently and read through his past articles in two nights. Although most of his posts have nothing to do with concurrency, he has very valuable insights to share about software development and I highly recommend him (although he falls into the category of writers whom you either love or hate, so be warned 😉 ).

I would also like to introduce you to some additional features I have included into this blog recently (or better: I have merely installed the WordPress-Plugins to do so). First of all, the sidebar has changed considerably, as I have added new ways to navigate through this blog. Most noticeable is probably the tagcloud, but you can also see the most read posts and the highest rated posts there. Speaking of ratings, I would encourage you to actually use that system and rate my articles if you feel like it. The ratings can be added at the bottom of each post and give me valuable feedback as to what topics interest you the most, how well written a post actually is or where I have screwed up (although of course I would appreciate any comments in these cases as well).

I have also tried to make RSS-subscription easier by including a list of common web-based feed-readers (to be honest, I am using my Feedburner feed statistics as one of my primary measures of success for this blog – the more people subscribe, the happier I will be :P). Subscription by email is also possible and encouraged, of course.