Camping at Joshua Tree National Park

This Memorial Day weekend we camped at Joshua Tree National Park. Campsites were full and we were just lucky to get (probably) the last campsite that wasn't already taken up. Next time we go camping we have to remember to get there a day early at these "first come first served" sites.

We spent a little less than 24 hours at the park. Camping was fun and we managed to do a moderately strenuous hike to 49 Palms Oasis. Overall it was not bad. Being a desert there's really not much to write home about.

So, we spent an evening at Knott's Soak City on our way back from Joshua Tree.

The next day we did a nice hike in LA, where the world famous Hollywood sign is posted on the side of a hill.

Overall the weather was warm, sunny and cool winds blowing that made hiking at both places enjoyable.


View Trip/May 2013/Joshua Tree and LA in a larger map

Cheers!

A collection of "low level" JVM and JavaScript related articles and more

Here's a nice collection of "low level" JVM and JavaScript related articles. None of which would be on anyone's list for low level programming.

While doing some reading on math and matrix operations in Java I came across many projects trying to overcome the limitations of the JVM while trying to implement numerical recipes:

• A good (slightly old) paper on ways to store matrices more efficiently
• Some evaluation of the different libraries that do efficient, element wise matrix operations
• More interestingly, we still don't have SSE support in Java for matrix operations - a request that has been open since 2007

While we are stuck with this, Dart seems to be making better progress by supporting SIMD instructions. JavaScript is getting weirder ("low level") with Emscripten and Asm.js.

Other interesting Java related reading material:

• Unsafe and lazy set - I've long wondered what lazySet() did
• Packed Objects - tuples in the JVM
• An evaluation of collections in Java for primitives
• Transform your JARs into executables
• JVM heap dumps using GDB
• I had no idea "top -H" would display all threads in a process/JVM
• Crash the JVM instantly to see if your app can survive crashes (hint: Unsafe.putLong(0, 0) to force a segfault)
• Disruptor + log4j2 = very fast, async logging
• If you've never seen Doug Lea on stage before - Future of the JVM, panel discussion
• Charlie Hunt – The Fundamentals of JVM Tuning, a nice tutorial
• Gallery of processor cache effects 
• Two good Cassandra tech talks

More next time! (Of course)