Blogs

Hi!

Sorry for having been blog-lazy; first New Year's resolution: more posts.

This time I'll spread two revolutionary news items; they are "officially" public but hey, that doesn't mean everybody knows :-) It's on Rene and Fons, and no, you guessed wrong :-)

Hi!

Welcome to our new server, a blazingly fast 8 core Xeon 5520 with 24GB RAM. Don't tell anyone, but it's not running SLC5... Talking about OSes: Ubuntu Server is a really nice OS.

Hi!

The C++ "0x" draft has been published last week, finally! It might still change, but probably not much.

Hi!

Before ACAT 2010 I spent a week in northern India, visiting e.g. the royal bath of the Kumbh Mela in Haridwar, a 10 million Hindu Ganges bathing event. Scary? Yes. But what an amazing experience!

Hi!

Since version 5.26, ROOT's files are much faster to read; reports regarding ATLAS AODs regularly show a factor 6 speedup. I will explain where this acceleration comes from (or better what stopped previous ROOT files from being that fast) and how you can enable it. Disclaimer: almost all of what I describe here was done by Rene; I only describe his findings and solutions.

Hi!

I'm happy to see that the title got you here :-) As a matter of fact, this is about several bugs in ROOT. We had code like

if (!CheckServerIsUp(server)) {
  MarkServerBad(server);
}

That code is just fine, right? Well, read on...

Hi!

Bjarne Stroustrup was here at CERN many weeks ago. In my previous entry I promised to tell you what else we were discussing: threading, symbols and reflection.

Hi!

Bjarne Stroustrup was here at CERN last week. He gave a public presentation on the design of C++0x. We also invited him for a technical discussion of the issues we run into with C++, with a restricted audience. In this edition I'll give a summary of the latter: an intense, fruitful meeting with lots of interesting insights - as Bjarne Stroustrup claims on both sides :-)

Hi!

We all use it, in different levels of frequency and perfection. Most of us love it for its speed, hate it for its syntax - but have no reason to think about how to improve it, and where we hit the limits of C++. A bit like The Truman Show. Let's have a look at C++ itself for a minute.

Hi!

There are still a few days until the next major version of ROOT will be available for download (June 30th). It's a good occasion to tell you want you might like about it! We have put more than thousand patches into ROOT since the last production release. Deciding what's relevant and interesting out of that is of course very much a matter of taste - so here is my personal list of favorite changes that showed up in ROOT during the last year: