Software development

Software development blog gathers a wide variety of interests related to software and information systems. The blog talks about software development practices and tools, as well as software systems and interaction design. Software development at CSC is focused on scientific software and administrative systems for higher education.

Salvaging hard drives with ddrescue —

Submitted by Aleksi Kallio — posted on 2011-09-06 16:39 — comments: 8

As a Java programmer, you tend to not be bothered about hardware. Unfortunately sometimes hardware will come and pull out the rug from under you... Read more

Mac OS X key bindings in Java —

Submitted by Aleksi Kallio — posted on 2011-02-09 14:43 — comments: 0

Mac OS X key bindings in Java - How hard can it be? We've found out that our software does not follow all Mac conventions when it comes to keyboards shortcuts. This was a bit of a surprise, as everything has been done "by the book". Read more

Performance comparison of streamed encryption and compression —

Submitted by Aleksi Kallio — posted on 2011-01-21 18:00 — comments: 0

In the last post I discussed encrypting users' data files when they move around in a distributed system, such as Chipster. The big practical question was not answered: Will it be fast enough? To answer that I did some performance tests and give the results here. Read more

Encrypting and compressing your data on fly —

Submitted by Aleksi Kallio — posted on 2011-01-20 19:48 — comments: 0

When running a distributed system for data analysis, you have to take the big responsibility for your users' data. While doing development for our Chipster system, we started to think about the question: How to make that big responsibility smaller? Read more

Bleak future of open source in open web? —

Submitted by Aleksi Kallio — posted on 2011-01-18 15:46 — comments: 0

In a recent issue of the Wired magazine the big theme was: Is the Web dead? The take home message was that the heterogenous collection of independent companies, public institutions and individuals that made up the Web in past has been largely replaced by large centralised services. If open Web is to lose ground for closed systems, will this happen also for open source? Read more

Memory management in modern times —

Submitted by Aleksi Kallio — posted on 2010-10-04 10:29 — comments: 0

For us application programmers of modern times the canonical advice to memory management has been: don't do it. Trying to be too clever can lead to a serious degradation of performance, unless you are very careful. A couple of recent blog posts got me thinking that things are not so simple after all... Read more

CSC HPC training curriculum —

Submitted by Pekka Manninen — posted on 2010-07-08 15:01 — comments: 0

There will be a set of 1-3 day intense courses which will complete a "A first course in HPC", that is, a no-nonsense introduction to parallel programming and code optimization. Read more

Workflow engines for scientific computing —

Submitted by Aleksi Kallio — posted on 2010-06-10 15:59 — comments: 2

What is the difference between workflows and programming languages? Programming languages have proven succesfull. Why do we need workflow engines, because they seem to do basically the same thing? Read more