So what have I been up to lately? Well, lots of different things. I have been taking it easy on the open source and blogging side of things as its been a hectic time of late in my personal life. This seems to be changing now so I’m starting to get all of the ideas spinning around in my head into physical reality, or virtual reality, or what ever you want to call it. Anyway, here’s the first post on the subject of programming in F# using MonoDevelop and Mono natively on Macs.

This post is to be filed in the “useless but fun” category. A friend of mine was doing some Hadoopy stuff a few days ago, experimenting with rather large sparse matrices and their products. Long story short, we ended up wondering how sparse the product of 2 sparse matrices should be. A sparse matrix is a matrix which is primarily filled with zeros. The product of two matrices involves computing the dot product of each row of the first one, with each column of the second one. There is clearly a relationship[...]

In general, when you see async void in your code it’s bad news, because: you can’t wait for its completion (as mentioned in this post already) any unhandled exceptions will terminate your process (ouch!)   Suppose you have a timer event that fires every once in a while and you want to do some asynchronous [...]