March 2005 - Jim Johnson's Blog

  • Telling when a transaction is done

    The purpose of a transaction is to group a bunch of actions that an application takes together, and to either perform all of them or none of them as a unit. It’s a pretty reasonable assumption, therefore, that a transaction should be sure that it...
  • What I'm reading at the moment

    I normally tend to oscillate between science fiction and non-fiction, with occasional forays into mysteries. Just now, I'm in the non-fiction phase. I'm currently reading The Spartans by Paul Cartledge. I've found it a very approachable book. It's not...
  • Fallback or Promotion?

    I did get some questions at work about my use of the word fallback to describe migrating the coordination from a lighter weight TM to a more general one. We also refer to that as promotion , and I believe that both are correct, and depend completely on...
  • What is this LTM thing?

    As I mentioned in my previous post on fallback, I've read a number of comments and questions about what the LTM is, and how it works. Since then I've been caught up in work, in some classes, and I caught the flu. February was definitely a busy month....
  • Indigo needs testers

    If you ever wanted to work at Microsoft, and if you love distributed systems, Indigo has some opportunities that you should check out. See http://www.microsoft.com/careers/search/details.aspx?jobid=32de915e-346f-40fc-8bee-a180e5782ce3 and http://www.microsoft...