Map Reduce

Most of my work here at IIIT is on the Apache Hadoop project. Hadoop is an implementation of the Map-Reduce framework originally put forth for parallel programming by Google. Its based on the map and reduce routines which are commonly found in many functional languages.
Recently there has been a lot of interest in MR. One of the important reasons is that it makes writing parallel applications, especially those that have to deal with huge amount of data distributed over unreliable computers, very easy.
Yahoo! is currently running a Hadoop cluster of over 1000 nodes, and they are doing pretty interesting stuff with it.

Although Hadoop has emerged as the leading open source implementation there are others worth mentioning:

1. The QT Concurrent package supports MR. I am not sure if it has support for distributed operation though.
2. There is an MR implementation available for Ruby called Skynet(don't know why they chose this name) as well, like every other thing that Ruby has, this also makes writing MR code ridiculously easy.

Duff's Device

http://research.swtch.com/2008/01/on-duffs-device-and-coroutines.html

Duff's device is a strange quirk in the C language. No it is not something wrong about compilers etc. since it is perfectly valid C program by any grammar / standard that you want!

Katilana Ada

Ada as many people don't know is a programming language popularly used in mission critical software systems like avionics and defense systems. One of my friend _saw_ ada being used in a satellite phone, though he never got to work in ada.

It was a nice surprise to know people are doing things with Ada out of the embedded systems world, are happy about it and get gains out of it. Read more here :
http://pinderkent.blogsavy.com/archives/150

In the Beginning...

In the Beginning was the Command Line - Neal Stephenson

http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

You have to get the article as a zipped text file. It is quite long but the analogies that he gives are quite funny, witty and amusing. I am yet to read the complete article. He explains some concepts using common idioms and examples. Many of them are not Universal e.g. cars related to US of A, Disney in Main Street US of A but you will get a hang of it. I suppose any one who is remotely amused and interested in history of computers would find the article engaging.

Folklore

Folklore (www.folklore.org) is an interesting project. It aims at capturing history through different perspectives of the people involved in it. According to the site they are currently working on Macintosh. It has been quite a while since I saw a post there.

You will find a lot of anecdotes given by Burrel Smith and Andy Hertzfeld. The website gives the feel of heydays of Apple and various people that made it apart from Stebve Jobs.

Initially you might not relate to couple of the articles as the names mentioned in them would not be known to you, my suggestion is they aren't many you will get idea when you would have read a bunch of them. Following are few articles which I can recommend reading from top of my mind, I am sure any one remotely interested in so called technical details as well as history will find the complete archive intriguing and engaging.

Bugs:
http://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&topic=Bugs&detail=medium

Reality Distortion Field (Reality seems to get distorted when you are near Steve Jobs)
http://www.folklore.org/ProjectView.py?project=Macintosh&topic=Reality%20Distortion&detail=medium

An awkward game, interesting author:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Donkey.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium&search=bill%20gates

A Rich Neighbor: You will find this in the movie Pirates of the Silicon Valley
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Donkey.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium&search=bill%20gates

Round Rectangles
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Donkey.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium&search=bill%20gates

I invented Burrell
Office humor, Jef Raskin I think was the guy behind Macintosh and Steve Jobs didn't give the deserved credit to him [so i suppose]
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=I_Invented_Burrell.txt&sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date&detail=medium&search=invented

int main(void)

So dear Bakarbandhus, lets start the tech bakar!
I have put in just a simple theme for now, but please suggest some cool and funky themes, and if you know how to make this blog look better, why not share it with us here?

Some things to be decided:

1. Topicality: What should qualify as tech bakar? Is anything allowed?
2. A solid punch line
   
3. Regular columns: Reviews, polls etc