+++ type = "blog" author = "nielx" title = "T-DOSE (II)" date = "2007-10-13T21:58:40.000Z" tags = ["event", "community"] +++

Excuse me for the brevity of the previous post, it was done on my mobile phone (per experiment), and thus I was limited in the amount of characters I could post.

I just returned from Eindhoven (which, by the way, <em>is</em> the most ugly city in the Netherlands), and all in all I had a fun day. I went to see two talks: one on KDE 4 programming by Adriaan de Groot. I met him six years ago, when I was part of the Dutch translation team and we celebrated five years of KDE. He announced technologies, that for us as Haiku lovers, weren't all that new. For example: finally KDE introduced <a href="http://api.kde.org/4.0-api/kdelibs-apidocs/threadweaver/html/index.html">Thread Weaver</a>, an API that provides a job-based interface to perform tasks in threads. Of course, since X is always limited to the single-thread event model, this still makes the GUI run in a single thread. He also introduced an API to play sound files with three lines of code. <a href="http://www.beunited.org/bebook/The%20Media%20Kit/SoundPlayer.html">We already have that one!</a> Seriously though, it was nice to see some of the cool things such as <a href="http://api.kde.org/4.0-api/kdelibs-apidocs/sonnet/html/index.html">Sonnet</a>, an integrated spell checker that is applied to almost all text input, and <a href="http://api.kde.org/4.0-api/kdelibs-apidocs/solid/html/index.html">Solid</a>, an abstraction for hardware. Whilst this is <em>extremely</em> useful for KDE, since it runs on many platforms, the cleanliness of the API (on first sight) might provide some interesting ideas for Haiku as well.

The second talk I could enjoy was one by Joern Engel, on efficient data structures. While I'm not a very technical person, I did enjoy his talk. He outlined different ways to store data, in linear lists, in hashes and in B-trees, and explains their efficiency based on speed. His idea is the following: since RAM essentially is a high-latency, high-speed data storage medium - with current hardware advancements, hard disks have the same speed - and the L1-cache has become the low-latency memory, we need to work as efficiently as possible when creating data structures. By predicting what the CPU will prefetch into the L1-cache, we can pick data structures that fit best what we do with our data. He calculated what operations were most efficient on B-trees, on hashes and on linearly stored data. Conclusion: certain types of B-trees have the most advantage, and sometimes a hash can be very efficient, depending on the context, but "if you want to use hashes, use B-trees instead".

Afterwards we had the 'social event', we went out for diner. I'd like to thank the organisation for their generosity: for the speakers, the diner was on them. During the diner I had the time to talk to some interesting people about Open Source (yes, we had the MIT versus GPL debate - luckily I'm good at debating), about the difference between Dutch and Flemish, and so on. I also got to lobby people to come to my speech tomorrow.

Anyway, I'm going to work on the speech now: due to the fact that the crowd is a lot more geek than I expected, I'm going to transform the speech into a more technical one. For tomorrow, keep your fingers crossed for a good turn-out!