Related Links
This is a loose collection of interesting links for the people involved in the Thunar development, and may probably be of some use to others as well.
Manuals
Links to a few online manuals that may be useful.
SVN Book
Free online chapters from the book Open Source Development with SVN. Describes the basic usage of SVN and also includes several nifty tips and tricks.
DocBook: The Definitive Guide
A clear, concise and normative reference to the DocBook DTD, that explains how to create DocBook documents, and especially contains an extensive documentation for every single element, including the intended semantics and the purpose of all its attributes.
UML Tutorial
Introductive tutorial to UML (Unified modelling language); describes the basic ideas and goals of UML and the various diagram types used in software engineering.
http://pigseye.kennesaw.edu/~dbraun/csis4650/A&D/UML_tutorial/
Articles
AlphaSort
This article describes AlphaSort, a highly optimized sort algorithm. Especially interesting for Thunar is the optimization technique described in this article: Take care that your code does not only reduce disk access as much as possible, but equally important, make sure that your code is cache-sensitive. Read the article, its worth the download.
Abstract. A new sort algorithm, called AlphaSort, demonstrates that commodity processors and disks can handle commercial batch workloads. Using commodity processors, memory, and arrays of SCSI disks, AlphaSort runs the industry standard sort benchmark in seven seconds. This beats the best published record on a 32-CPU 32-disk Hypercube by 8:1. On another benchmark, AlphaSort sorted more than a gigabyte in one minute. AlphaSort is a cache-sensitive, memory intensive sort algorithm. We argue that modern architectures require algorithm designers to re-examine their use of the memory hierarchy. AlphaSort uses clustered data structures to get good cache locality, file striping to get high disk bandwidth, QuickSort to generate runs, and replacement-selection to merge the runs. It uses shared memory multiprocessors to break the sort into subsort chores. Because startup times are becoming a significant part of the total time, we propose two new benchmarks: (1) MinuteSort: how much can you sort in one minute, and (2) PennySort: how much can you sort for one penny.
