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My take on Android vs. iPhone
After months and months of research, I finally broke down a few weeks ago and purchased a smart phone. When I first decided to replace my aging Motorola RAZR, I wanted something that didn't cost a fortune and provided a basic 'net experience when i was away from my Mac. After playing around with a number of phones, I narrowed my choices down to theApple iPhone, the Motorola DROID and the Sprint EVO. I went back and forth for weeks, but decided to purchase a Sprint EVO for a couple of reasons: Sprint has the most cost effective plans IMHO…
$ read more →UNIX IPC tutorial in C
Brian Hall, "Beej" wrote a cool tutorial explaining all the different aspects of traditional UNIX Inter Process Communication (IPC). He provides a lot of C code where you can compile / test these concepts yourself for a better understanding. The high level concepts in this tutorial would be great material to use in conducting technical interviews. =) Thanks Brian!
$ read more →My 1000th blog post
Wow, I can't believe 999 blog entries have been posted to the prefetch blog! This blog started all the way back in October of 2004, and was a way for me to document technology as I learned it. I never thought people would actually read it, and am even more amazed that this site now generates close to 600k+ hits per month. Yikes…
$ read more →Slides from my CentOS cluster server presentation
The fine folks at ALE invited me back this month to give a presentation on CentOS cluster server. I had a blast presenting, and want to thank everyone for coming out. The slide deck I used is now up on my website, and I will post links to the cluster configuration file I discussed later this week.
$ read more →Great write-up on AMD's RVI (Rapid Virtualization Indexing) hardware assisted virtualization feature
I came across an awesome Q&Q where Tim Mueting from AMD described the hardware virtualization features in AMD Opteron CPUs. The following excerpt from the interview was especially interesting: Prior to the introduction of RVI, software solutions used something called shadow paging to translate a virtual machine “guest” physical address to the system’s physical address. Because the original page table architecture wasn’t designed with virtualization in mind, a mirror of the page tables had to be created in software, called shadow page tables, to keep information about the physical location of “guest” memory. With shadow paging, the hypervisor must keep the shadow page tables “in sync” with the page tables in hardware…
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