In this weeks LWN there was a reference to the editors "L1 Bookshelf" -- i.e. what he could grab without moving.

I thought it might be interesting to find out what others had on thier "L1 Bookshelf". Mine consists of

• A folder labeled "ELF/ABI stuff" with ELF and ABI documentation.
• A folder labeled "Superpage" with papers about superpages
• A folder labeled "IA64 Architecture Stuff" with more papers
• Latex Line by Line - Diller
• Understanding and Using COFF - Gintaras Gircys
• Operating Systems Internals and Design Principles - Stallings
• Algorithms for compiler designed - Kakde
• Programming with POSIX Threads - Butenhof
• TCP/IP Illustrated - Stevens
• ISO/IEC 9899:1999(E) - C99 Standard
• IA64 Linux Kernel - Design and Implemenation - Mosberger and Eranian
• Box of Earl Grey Tea
• Various Linux CDs

I watched a documentary on Michelangelo the other day, which went into some detail about his David. Despite having seen the real thing, it suddenly struck me how much Frodo from Lord of the Rings looks like him. It's that same pensive "oh shit" look they both seem to have, I think. Or maybe I'm just nuts.

From comp.lang.c

Question: How can I optimise code better than the compiler?

Answer: If you ask, then you can't.

With reference to Peter Hardy's day. Luckily these machines are smart enough to turn off when the ambient temperature gets to about 50^oC!

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

From SIGPLAN Notices Vol. 17, No. 9, September 1982, pages 7-13. Unfortunately The ACM digital library seems to have omitted these pages from their archive, however the full text is available online.

ianw@lime:~$ apt-get moo
         (__)
         (oo)
   /------\/
  / |    ||
 *  /\---/\
    ~~   ~~
...."Have you mooed today?"...

huh?

We can only hope he was joking suggesting Apple should move to Solaris on x86-64. I'm not sure how SPARC counts as a "volume platform" (whatever that means); maybe his spell checker accidently replaced a mis-spelling of "vacuum" platform, since everything I've read suggests their market is shrinking.

All will be revealed at the keynote, and no one cares what I think. But here's an alternative.

Dear Steve,

Your experiments with Darwin have hopefully started to show you how innovative systems architectures can provide better performance, security and stability.

We've recently shown that Itanium is an excellent architecture for implementing these systems. Why not have a look at some of the latest generation systems and we'll build something that is ready to push us forward for another twenty years or so.

If people think Xen is cool, wait till they see what you'll be able to do. And how much faster and cleaner you'll do it. Oh, and just like SPARC we can switch between big and little endian mode. Better still, the technology exists to run those PowerPC binaries directly. Not only that; we're a first class target for Linux development which means you've got an ecosystem to grow in. As you might say yourself ... "think about it"!

I sat behind a guy on the bus today, and he was holding what was clearly a bunch of readings for a course. He was asleep, head bobbing around like one of those little dogs on the car dash. The title of the paper he was "reading" ... "How to manage for motivation".