Making use of cloud computing resources like Google's App Engine, or Salesforce.com, or Amazon S3, while all the rage, still makes some folks nervous. In particular, heads of enterprise development organizations who feel the need to tell their developers, "Nah-ah. Unless it's behind our firewall, you can't use it."

If you're trying to untangle all the complexities of keeping your parallel code scalable, you probably want Herb Sutter in your corner. His latest column is a clear-eyed discussion of the importance of locality (knowing where your data is stored) in avoiding a classic parallel computing problem: the convoy.

Oh, boy do you owe it to yourself to give this a read: Tunny, Colossus and Ada: Keeping an Open Mind .

It's a great story of a contest centered on the rebuilding of the Colossus Mark 2 codebreaking machine used by the Bletchley Park boffins. To celebrate, the British National Museum of Computing issued a challenge: They would transmit a signal encoded with an original WWII German cipher, and then

Writing portable code is almost always a matter of proper and powerful abstractions. But sometimes just getting your code to compile on a range of platforms is only half the battle.

 

Over on Dr. Dobb's Portal, we've just posted a great article by Christopher Diggins on Cat , a sweet little stack-based language he developed from Manfred von Thun's Joy language. Says Christopher:

'My interest in Joy was primarily motivated by my search for an intermediate language that could be easily targeted by imperative and functional languages, could be easily optimized, and could be

Apple does a pretty good job keeping itself in the news, so normally I don't feel they need my help. But a couple of recent news items seem significant. The first is the news that Apple is making pretty significant inroads in US personal computer market share. They're at 14%, up from 9% this time last year. That's a huge jump in one year.

The second bit of news is the cornucopia of security fixes Apple released yesterday: 90 or so vulnerabilities were patched, split roughly in half between Mac OS X and the Safari browser.

Welcome to the Internet. Trust no one.

Living in my bubble of tech-savvy friends and acquaintances, it's easy for me to forget that people need to be told this. But then, I get an e-mail from a particular person (who shall remain nameless) warning me about a virus going around in the form of an e-mail attachment entitled "Life is Beautiful." Of course, it's a forward, and I can see the chain of suckers going back several generations. I'm admonished not to open this attachment, because it will (of course) "erase my entire PC!!!"

Sometimes I think I should have been a network engineer. I love all that "belly of the internet beast" stuff—giant high-speed routers, huge data pipes, and all things close to the backbone of the Internet. But then I remember my grades from my engineering classes, and why I dropped engineering, and switched my major to English. Perhaps the engineer who broke both YouTube and the Pakistani Internet yesterday should have switched his major, too, before it was too late. I mean, I wouldn't want to be that guy right now. Would you want to be the guy who kept Pervez Musharraf from getting to his MySpace page?