A Blog by Malcolm Yoke Hean Low

Happy New Year 2012

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 19:31:38 +0800

Dead Sea Scroll Online by Google

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 19:10:53 +0800

Google has made available high resolution photographs of the Dead Sea Scroll online along with the English translation of the original Hebrew text.

Google Dynamic View

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 22:12:14 +0800

Google has launched a completely rebuilt, streamlined authoring and editing experience with seven new ways to display blogs in Blogger called Dynamic Views.

Built with the latest in web technology (AJAX, HTML5 and CSS3), Dynamic Views is a unique browsing experience that will inspire readers to explore blog in new ways. The interactive layouts make it easier for readers to enjoy and discover posts, loading 40 percent faster than traditional templates and bringing older entries to the surface so they seem fresh again.

Microsoft opens Windows 8 preview to all

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 22:07:52 +0800

Microsoft has made a preview of Windows 8 available to anyone who takes the time to download it.

Windows 8 Developer Preview, as Microsoft called the pre-beta build, was posted to a company website shortly after 8 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday.

The downloads, which range from 2.8GB to 4.8GB in size, come with no restrictions, a company spokeswoman confirmed earlier in the day.

The links to download Win8 torrents are here:

Windows 8 Developer Preview 64-bit + Developer tools

Windows 8 Developer Preview 64 bit

For the torrent for 32bit version, check out this whopping 11.3GB of download. Use selective downloading (unselect the 64bit ISOs in the file list of your torrent client).

Windows 8 Bundle

The direct download links:

Download Windows 8 Developer Preview (64-bit) with Developer Tools

Download Windows 8 Developer Preview (64-bit) without the developer tools

Download Windows 8 Developer Preview (32-bit)

HP launches cloud service beta

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 22:48:18 +0800

Hewlett-Packard has launched a beta IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) offering called HP Cloud Services. The initial offerings, called HP Cloud Compute and HP Cloud Object Storage, will provide compute and storage resources from HP's own data centers. HP will use the OpenStack set of open-source cloud software tools to provide the foundation for these services. Users can register on the Hewlett-Packard website.

Parallel Microsoft-Style

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 22:25:27 +0800

"Actors avoid the dangers of the shared-memory model because they touch only the data that's sent to them in messages. If they need some external data, they request it from other actors (by sending the request in the form of a message). In addition, the data actors receive is immutable. They don't change the data, rather they copy it and transform the copy. In this way, no two threads are ever contending for access to the same data item, nor are their internal operations interfering with one another. As a result, the nightmares I described earlier disappear almost completely."

This article from Dr. Dobb Journal discussed how the actor model of concurrency is gaining favor in Java but remains largely ignored by Microsoft.

Google Instant Pages

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 22:55:48 +0800

Google Instant Pages is now on by default in the latest stable version of Chrome. This means that sometimes when you click a Google search result in Chrome, the page will appear to load much faster than before. The video above shows a side by side comparison of Chrome with and without Instant Pages enabled.

Smart Sheet

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 23:23:51 +0800

Smartsheet is used by thousands of companies for online project management, task management, and many other types of work.

New Position

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 23:43:28 +0800

I have left NTU in June 2011 and is now with D-SIMLAB Technologies.

Google Chrome Notebook

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 10:19:42 +0800

The puzzle embedded in the video has been solved. See: Jamendo geeks solve the hidden Chrome OS equation (and win a Cr-48 netbook);

Google Chrome Blog: X = G / (C*H*R*O*M - 3);

Forget Brainstorming

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 17:51:39 +0800

According to this article from newsweek, brainstorming has been proven not to work since 1958, when Yale researchers found that the technique actually reduced a team’s creative output: the same number of people generate more and better ideas separately than together.

The State and Future of JavaScript

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:07:13 +0800

Douglas Crockford talks on the history of JavaScript unveiling some of the struggles the Ecma Technical Committee has had in advancing the language over the years, concluding with lessons learned: if one has a great idea he should not tell it to a standardization body but rather do it, a change to a widely used standard is an act of violence, standards are hard, and one cannot please everyone

Happy New Year 2010

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 12:03:15 +0800

What Should We Teach New Software Developers? Why? - CACM article by Bjarne Stroustrup

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 23:58:15 +0800

What Should We Teach New Software Developers? Why?

Bjarne Stroustrup in CACM viewpoint, "Fundamental changes to computer science education are required to better address the needs of industry. Computer science must be at the center of software systems development. If it is not, we must rely on individual experience and rules of thumb, ending up with less capable, less reliable systems, developed and maintained at unnecessarily high cost. We need changes in education to allow for improvements of industrial practice."

Software Engineering Method and Theory: Call for Action Statement

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 08:12:02 +0800

The Software Engineering Method And Theory (SEMAT) Community Call for Action Statement:

Software engineering is gravely hampered today by immature practices. Specific problems include:

The prevalence of fads more typical of fashion industry than of an engineering discipline.
The lack of a sound, widely accepted theoretical basis.
The huge number of methods and method variants, with differences little understood and artificially magnified.
The lack of credible experimental evaluation and validation.
The split between industry practice and academic research.

We support a process to refound software engineering based on a solid theory, proven principles, and best practices that:

Includes a kernel of widely-agreed elements, extensible for specific uses.
Addresses both technology and people issues.
Is supported by industry, academia, researchers and users.
Supports extension in the face of changing requirements and technology.

You can become a supporter of the community by signing up at the site: www.semat.org.

A System-based Approach to Spares Management

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:06:58 +0800

The traditional approach to inventory provisioning sets all spares requirements to a level that meets an item’s performance measure, such as a stock-out protection level, a fill rate, a mission critical rate, or a confidence level. Such an approach cannot explicitly consider the overall performance of the system, nor can it be constrained to a set total cost for the spares mix.

However, a spares' benefit should be measured in terms of the projected increase in system availability by adding that spare to the inventory. The system-based inventory provisioning approach is significantly different from the traditional item approach for generating spares requirements, which treats all items the same. In system-based inventory provisioning, spares can then be ranked in terms of benefit, then divided by cost as a measure of the desirability of adding them to the inventory. The problem then is to answer the question "What mix of spare parts is required to keep the system at some level of operational performance for a specific scenario?". An optimal solution in this case means a solution in which no other mix of spares can provide a greater system availability for the same cost, or the same system availability for less cost (within the scope of the model assumptions and data). Thus, there exists not just one solution, but a set of solutions that represent different trade-off between system availability and cost.

An example of system-based inventory provisioning is the work on the Aircraft Sustainability Model from the Logistics Management Institute which is a mathematical statistical model used by the United States Air Force to computes optimal spares mixed to support a wide range of possible scenarios. Another example is the D-SIMSPAIR product from D-SIMLAB Technologies which uses simulation-based optimization to compute optimal mix of aerospace rotables for maintenance contracts.

Compilers and More: OpenCL Promises and Potential

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 12:49:36 +0800

In this article, Michael Wolfe from PGI discusses different aspects of OpenCL. Given all the hype, what can we expect from OpenCL? Is it really simple? Is it portable? Will it replace other parallel programming models?

Ebook: HPC for Dummies

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:37:59 +0800

This special edition eBook from Sun and AMD shares details on real-world uses of HPC, explains the different types of HPC, guides you on how to choose between different suppliers, and provides benchmarks and guidelines you can use to get your system up and running. Get it here.

Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:35:29 +0800

An interesting article by Tom DeMarco, author of the 1979 book "Structured Analysis and System Specification" and inventor of the data flow diagram.

An Introduction to Parallel Programming - Module 1: Performance Tuning

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:57:39 +0800

A seven part series from Sun on the introduction to parallel programming. Part 1 is on performance tuning.