This week I learned...

• A five-step checklist saved about 1,500 lives in Michigan intensive care units in 18 months. It lists the five steps a physician should take, when putting a tube into a patient, to prevent infection.

• Simple array lookups like arr[i], where i is an int, are troublesome for x64 compilers. This is because int is a 32-bit type, while arr is 64 bits. To generate the fastest possible code, the compiler must prove that the high 32 bits of the register containing i are all zeroes.

• OpenGL is horrible for 2D graphics because 2D graphics are usually plainer and stay on the screen statically for a lot longer than 3D graphics. So a little imprecision is a very bad thing, especially for text. 3D cards don't have a whole lot of DWIM in them; if your use of an API is the slightest bit off, you can get bizarrely ugly results, and it's very hard to debug.

  This is an instance of a principle that I think works against efforts like bug.gd: the most perplexing things computers do don't come with error messages. Instead it just behaves funny, and gives no indication that it even knows it's doing it.

• An interference graph is a way of thinking about scheduling constraints. For example, many compilers use an interference graph to assign variables to CPU registers. The vertices of the graph are the variables. Each edge connecting two vertices indicates that those two variables cannot live in the same register—their lifetimes overlap; they would interfere. The problem of register allocation is just a graph coloring problem on the interference graph.

  Graph coloring is NP-hard, though. Some JIT compilers do a linear scan instead, plopping each variable into the next available register. This may not get every variable into a register, even in cases where graph-coloring would. But it's fast.

Phone interviews are educational. :)

Merry Christmas!