Virtio, AOP, social currencies, and primitive media

Some questions and corresponding links that caught my fancy around the week of November 11-18:

1. Might virtio make sense as a user-land IPC protocol transport?

   • virtio
   • man 2 futex
   • LWN: “Fast interprocess communication revisited”
   • Ømq zguide
   • Lockless Inc.’s articles

2. How does aspect-oriented programming transfer to Haskell?

   • EffectiveAdvice

3. In “Debt: The First 5000 Years”, David Graeber writes of three basic principles – communism, exchange, and hierarchy – which he describes as “the moral grounds of economic relations” (p. 94). Soon thereafter, he begins to explore several “social currencies” that have been used in cultures with powerful “human economies” but weak commercial economies to “create, maintain, and otherwise reorganize relationships between people” (p. 130).

   What principles and mechanisms are used to create, maintain, and otherwise reorganize relationships between people in cultures with powerful commercial economies like our own?

4. What kinds of “primitive media” exist for information flow and what are the corresponding interfaces?

   • (The “gimmes” here are “spacetime and E/M” which, together, transmit the patterns (shape, motion, color, presence, …) of kinetic energy, electromagnetic energy, and matter for which our bodies (mostly) provide built-in interfaces. However, are there other, less commonly experienced media?)

Next time: some brief thoughts on the metallic rules…