Having worked in the software industry for almost 20 years now, I don’t count myself to be the smartest or most skilled in the trade, but I always had a lot of opportunities to work among the brightest and talented people. And unfortunately, I had also worked with idiots and jerks. I had the opportunities [...]
There is one thing the Canadian government has done right, at least in the field of computer programming, is banning computer programmers to call themselves engineers. In Canada, engineers must be certified. And if you are not certified, regardless of your qualification, you are not an engineer. Normally, I’m not for more government involvement as [...]
After many many (too many!!!) months of hard work, the cloud storage Yunio 2.0 is finally released this week. A big applause for the whole team, and many thanks for sticking together during all this time. We had our lows and highs, but we finally achieved the major milestone. The only regrets are that there [...]
I’ve been working for some times on a distributed storage project, with Erlang as the main programming language. We use the RADOS API to access the storage, which is based on Ceph. As librados does not have an Erlang binding yet, so I did some binding for some of the APIs that we really needed. [...]
In the last two weeks, under the invitation of two friends, I have taken over a development team in disarray. The planned release date of the project was set for April 1st (no, it was not a joke), but by mid April, less than 20% of the work has been done. To be honest, I [...]
Go has provided very nice primitives and built-in features which made multicore and multi-processor programming easy. One of the nice things about the Go features is to encourage an approach in which shared values are passed around on channels to different goroutines, so that we can avoid the subtle difficulty of implementing correct access to [...]
In the last post, I have investigated the performance of Erlang and Go to create a large number of processes, or goroutines in the case of Go. The test program would spawn a large number of processes, and then send a termination message to all of them to terminate. The purpose is to see how [...]
Erlang has been known for its prowess in concurrent and distributed programming, by providing the three primitives spawn, send, and receive, which make concurrent programming easy. Although Erlang may not be the first to provide such a built-in language feature, its selling point was that you can create hundreds or thousands of cooperating Erlang processes [...]
The Google’s new programming language, Go, after a few years of development, has finally reached the v1.0 milestone recently. Like a lot of programmers, we just want to try it out. Although I have looked at it when it was first announced a few years ago, but I haven’t bothered since then. Today, I just [...]
With all these new phones and tablets coming out, a lot of Android devices are now equipped with more than one SD cards. On these new devices, there is usually an internal (built-in) storage device, and an external storage device. The built-in storage device might not be an SD card, but the external storage device [...]