Category: Thinking out loud
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Why is Lamport’s Scalar Clock only consistent, not strongly consistent?
For the last couple days, I’ve been watching the distributed systems video lectures and reading the recommended papers that cover logical clocks. Even after making multiple passes on the material, the concepts just haven’t clicked: I cannot wrap my mind around why Lamport’s clocks satisfy only consistency — not strong consistency. But now I think…
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Failure: I want more of it.
Students in the Georgia Tech program collaborate with one another — and collaborate with professors and teacher assistants — through a platform called Piazza. But at the end of the semester, this forum shuts off to read only mode, meaning we all lose connection with one another. Because of this, I recently created an e-mail…
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20s for education, 30s for experience, 40s for career.
In my mid twenties, I was blessed to receive some of the best career, and quite frankly, life advice. During that period of my life, I was working as a director of technology, leading a small group of engineers. But I was getting ready to throw in the towel. I lacked both the experience and…
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Being paged out of bed at 3 AM …
Sadly I didn’t get to start the day off with writing, my morning routine, since my phone paged me out of bed at 3 AM due to an operational issue from work that lasted about about three hours. Because of this, I know that I’ll feel “off” the rest of the day given that I’ve…
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Farmhouse style doors – sliding door ideas for my home office
Below are a couple photos of farm house doors that I think have good taste. I’m thinking of adding one of these type of doors to my new home office and wanted to share a couple of styles that I thought were both warm and aesthetically pleasing, two qualities I’m aiming to bring out of…
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What’s the point of the parity flag in the dissemination barrier?
I’m implementating the dissemination barrier (above) in C for my advanced OS course and I’m not quite sure I understand the pseudo code itself. In particular, I don’t get the point of the parity flag …. what’s the point of it? What problem does it solve? Isn’t the localsense variable sufficient to detect whether or…
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Learning how to build a personal brand (two books I picked up)
I want to learn how to better market myself and what it means to create my own personal brand and how I might be able to apply these marketing skills in my career (as a software developer and computer scientist) and as a writer. Because I do wonder what sort of impact and influence I…
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Making sense of the “sense reversing barrier” (synchronization)
What’s the deal with a sense reversing barrier? Even after watching the lectures on the topic, I was still confused as to how a single flag could toggle between two values (true and false) can communicate whether or not all processes (or threads) are running in the same critical section. This concept completely baffled me.…
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Thinking out loud – Not fully understanding virtually indexed physically tagged (VIPT) details
I’m really struggling to intimately understanding virtually index privately tagged concept. From a high level, I get that VIPT is an optimization technique, parallelizing both the translation of virtual addresses to physical and the cache look up of the physical address. This seems impossible at first since the cache depends on the physical frame number…