Category Archives: Uncategorized

Sheriff: Precise Detection and Automatic Mitigation of False Sharing Tongping Liu, Emery D. Berger, OOPSLA 2011 False sharing is an insidious problem for multithreaded programs running on multicore processors, where it can silently degrade performance and scalability. Previous tools for detecting … Continue reading →

If you have an iPad, and (like me) you’d like to be able to take handwritten notes on it, there is finally a decent stylus that does the job: the AluPen. It’s chunky and a little weird, with a round rubber … Continue reading →

I like my MacBook Air (my hands are soaking in it right now), but the speakers suck. I have never been able to get much volume out of them. Until now. One of the winners of the MacWorld awards this … Continue reading →

I was just at POPL and got a very nice compliment on a talk I gave on Grace from someone who watched it on-line (!). That talk was the first in my on-going efforts to eliminate all text from my … Continue reading →

I am shepherding a paper for ASPLOS, and the authors kindly sent me a PDF highlighting all changes between the previous version and the next. They used latexdiff. I just used it to see some updates made by a student … Continue reading →

Photos of the actual signs deployed in the rally, courtesy of Kevin Fu and Dan Wallach!

Sadly, I am not going to attend the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in DC tomorrow. I have seen some pretty good sign ideas: here are some CS-themed ones I came up with. Keep your eyes peeled: you might … Continue reading →

I used to be a PC guy, but have completely gone Mac (MacBook Air, Mac Mini, iPhone, iPad, Jobs Distortion Field Glasses, etc.). But Mac went Emery before Emery went Mac! Proof below: From http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/Libc/Libc-594.9.1/gen/magazine_malloc.c: /* Multithread enhancements for “tiny” allocations … Continue reading →

My student Charlie Curtsinger pointed out a better alternative to Cinch: BetterTouchTool. The name is not as nice, but unlike Cinch, BetterTouchTool lets you snap windows to corners. By default, these occupy 1/4th of the screen, but the proportions are … Continue reading →

Since making the move to Mac, I have discovered and installed some programs that I’ve found quite useful. Here’s one I use every day. Cinch is a window manager that emulates a feature from Windows 7, which has some nice … Continue reading →