We already discussed about Queue management solutions in the past, and I am always happy to write about it. Queue managers are not easy to implement, and there is a reson if IBM MQ Series is still a successful product. Some month ago, a big bank customer asked me to provide a small queue implementation to increase asynchronous internal processing of our payment solution.

The project had very strong contraints: I could not use existing queue system because they were not yet available, and I need to be able to provide microservice parallelism in a cloud-environent.

I have very little time to provide a solid solution, and re-inventing the wheel was not an option. Performance was important, but we plan to have a managable numbers of transactions per seconds, far behind modern cloud database capacity.

Challenge accepted.

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HP started designing handhelded calculators from 1968 until the end of ‘80. I buyed an HP-42S around 1993 but it has been designed near 1986.

Here I want to focus on the chip design of the 10C series, a compact set of calculator with programming abilities but with full numeric display. The HP-15C was introduced in 1982, in the full 8bit computer era, the same year of the C/64. Later model will feature a more mature “Saturn” processor. I will describe here this chip at the best of my abilities, because it sheds a light on how custom architecture was done around end of 1979.

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We installed Isso comment system one month ago. It is time to do some review. I will update this page in the next month to add more insights if they would occur to my mind. I chosed Isso for the following reasons:

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The HP-12C is the only HP RPN calculator which is still produced and sold, despite is was designed in 1980. The calculator is produced by a subsidary licensed by HP, and you can find it around 40$ in US and around 70€ in Europe/UK. There was designed more than 14 diferent revisions by HP.

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After years, I decided to try a FreeBSD fresh install, to revive a old MacBookPro: the results was great and impressive, also if you think the hardware is over 15 years old. I want to share with you my success.

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Sometimes you need to create a lot of CronJobs in k8s. In particular, in my last project I need to create a lot of stupid “web hooks” to fire complex job execution. K8s is well suited for this task because it take care of launching a single job instance, and relaunch them in case of error.

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Test driven development is a beast to tame. I like TDD but in the past it was quite difficult to achive, at least in a pure-consultant approach with a "turn key" framework behind.

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Sometimes you need to fix a production defect. To do it, you need to mirror a specific set of data, and do a test to proof the bug and then fix it.

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This week was very hot because Google published Gemma, a smal-size LLM, and also Nvidia has a rush on stock market, with a evaluation around 2000 BILLIONS dollars. Last but not least, Mistral.ai published a service for its more advanced model, which can also run on-prem.

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Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is artificial intelligence capable of generating text, images or other data using generative models, often in response to prompts.

Generative AI models learn the patterns and structure of their input training data and then generate new data that has similar characteristics. This similarity is probability-based.

At low level, these systems are based on Transformer deep-learning architecture and are called generative pre-trained transformer  (GPT) first defined in 2018 (for a complete description refer to Wikipedia)

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