PUBLIC MARKS from woody3k

Unexplained archeological anomalies

Failover clusters are used to ensure high availability of system services and applications even through crashes, hardware failures, and environmental mishaps. In this article, I'll show you how to implement a rock-solid two-node high availability Apache cluster with the heartbeat application from The High-Availability Linux Project. I tested the cluster on Fedora Core 5, CentOS 4.3, and Ubuntu 6.06.1 LTS server distributions.

This paper presents Glift, an abstraction and generic template library for defining complex, random-access graphics processor (GPU) data structures. Like modern CPU data structure libraries, Glift enables GPU programmers to separate algorithms from data structure definitions; thereby greatly simplifying algorithmic development and enabling reusable and interchangeable data structures. We characterize a large body of previously published GPU data structures in terms of our abstraction and present several new GPU data structures. The structures, a stack, quadtree, and octree, are explained using simple Glift concepts and implemented using reusable Glift components. We also describe two applications of these structures not previously demonstrated on GPUs: adaptive shadow maps and octree 3D paint. Lastly, we show that our example Glift data structures perform comparably to handwritten implementations while requiring only a fraction of the programming effort.

GPUTeraSort is a novel external sorting algorithm using graphics processors (GPUs) on large databases composed of billions of records and wide keys. It uses the data parallelism within a GPU along with task parallelism by scheduling memory-intensive and compute-intensive tasks on the GPU.

Abstract: Using the GPU to accelerate ray tracing may seem like a natural choice due to the highly parallel nature of the problem. However, determining the most versatile GPU data structure for scene storage and traversal is a challenge. In this paper, we introduce a new method for quick intersection of triangular meshes on the GPU. The method uses a threaded bounding volume hierarchy built from a geometry image, which can be efficiently traversed and constructed entirely on the GPU. This acceleration scheme is highly competitive with other GPU ray tracing methods, while allowing for both dynamic geometry and an efficient level of detail scheme at no extra cost.

Here's a quick Howto on setting up Ruby on Rails for Windows.

Updated / Improved guide for inspeciting a running ruby process without adding debug output or running under ruby-debug

Live debugging in Ruby using GDB

tovid is a collection of video disc authoring tools; it can help you create your own DVDs, VCDs, and SVCDs for playback on your home DVD player.

Simple method for setting up a Network Attached Storage server, with web config and admin

Ruby code for generating Atom and RSS2 feeds

I use the following bit of CSS to help visualize the structure of an XHTML (or HTML) document by putting a colored outline around the border of every element. At each level in the hierarchy the color changes so you can see when “depth” changes.

Unit Testing in Rails