Getting What You Measure

Posted on May 31, 2012 by admin

Four common pitfalls in using software metrics for project management

ERIC BOUWERS, SOFTWARE IMPROVEMENT GROUP AND DELFT UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY

JOOST VISSER, SOFTWARE IMPROVEMENT GROUP AND RADBOUD UNIVERSITY NIJMEGEN

ARIE VAN DEURSEN, DELFT UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY

Software metrics—helpful tools or a waste of time? For every developer who treasures these mathematical abstractions of software systems there is a developer who thinks software metrics are invented just to keep project managers busy. Software metrics can be very powerful tools that help achieve your goals but it is important to use them correctly, as they also have the power to demotivate project teams and steer development in the wrong direction.

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2229115

My Compiler Does Not Understand Me

Posted on May 23, 2012 by admin

Until our programming languages catch up, code will be full of horrors

POUL-HENNING KAMP

Only lately—and after a long wait—have a lot of smart people found audiences for making sound points about what and how we code. Various colleagues have been beating drums and heads together for ages trying to make certain that wise insights about programming stick to neurons. Articles on coding style in this and other publications have provided further examples of such advocacy.

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2220317

Modeling People and Places with Internet Photo Collections

Posted on May 15, 2012 by admin

Understanding the world from the sea of online photos

DAVID CRANDALL, SCHOOL OF INFORMATICS AND COMPUTING, INDIANA UNIVERSITY

NOAH SNAVELY, DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE, CORNELL UNIVERSITY

Computational photography often considers sets of photos taken by a single user in a single setting, but the popularity of online social media sites has created a social aspect to photo collections as well. Photo-sharing sites such as Flickr and Facebook contain vast amounts of latent information about our world and human behavior. Our recent work has involved building automatic algorithms that analyze large collections of imagery in order to understand and model people and places at a global scale. Geotagged photographs can be used to identify the most photographed places on Earth, as well as to infer the names and visual representations of these places. At a local scale, we can build detailed three-dimensional models of a scene by combining information from thousands of two-dimensional photographs taken by different people and from different vantage points. One key representation for many of these tasks is a network: a graph linking photos by visual similarity or other measures.

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2212756

Controlling Queue Delay

Posted on May 8, 2012 by admin

A modern AQM is just one piece of the solution to bufferbloat.

KATHLEEN NICHOLS, POLLERE INC.

VAN JACOBSON, PARC

Nearly three decades after it was first diagnosed, the “persistently full buffer problem,” recently exposed as part of bufferbloat,^6,7 is still with us and made increasingly critical by two trends. First, cheap memory and a “more is better” mentality have led to the inflation and proliferation of buffers. Second, dynamically varying path characteristics are much more common today and are the norm at the consumer Internet edge. Reasonably sized buffers become extremely oversized when link rates and path delays fall below nominal values.

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2209336

Bufferbloat: Dark Buffers in the Internet

Revisiting Network I/O APIs: The netmap Framework

The Robustness Principle Reconsidered

A Guided Tour through Data-center Networking

Posted on May 7, 2012 by admin

A good user experience depends on predictable performance within the data-center network.

DENNIS ABTS, BOB FELDERMAN, GOOGLE

The magic of the cloud is that it is always on and always available from anywhere. Users have come to expect that services are there when they need them. A data center (or warehouse-scale computer) is the nexus from which all the services flow. It is often housed in a nondescript warehouse-sized building bearing no indication of what lies inside. Amidst the whirring fans and refrigerator-sized computer racks is a tapestry of electrical cables and fiber optics weaving everything together—the data-center network. This article provides a “guided tour” through the principles and central ideas surrounding the network at the heart of a data center — the modern-day loom that weaves the digital fabric of the Internet.

http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2208919

Enterprise Grid Computing - Paul Strong - http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1080877

Cooling the Data Center - Andy Woods - http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1737963

Improving Performance on the Internet - Tom Leighton - http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1466449

ACM Queue

Architecting Tomorrow's Computing

Monthly Archives: May 2012