Most Popular Books by Peter Stevenson

Retells the classic tale of the little girl who explores the home of three bears while they are out, and includes finger puppets for children to act the story out.

Accident occurred during authorised solo circuit training in a microlight at Tauranga Aerodrome.

Tess comes to visit and makes friends with the dog, Paddy.

Historic buildings are irreplaceable, embodying shared public experiences and exhibiting qualities no longer achieved in new constructions such as iconic ornamentation or singular construction methods. It is these unique attributes and idiosyncrasies that contribute to the rich texture of successful, vibrant cities. The distinctive character and public significance of Auckland''s built heritage is frequently disregarded along with its potential for urban rejuvenation. Successful conservation and adaptation of historic buildings requires an approach that acknowledges the heritage guidelines, while producing a design which respects the old and allows the legibility of new adaptations and future uses. Marking the intersection of Hobson Street and Cook Street, the Thomas Doo Building stands alone, one of the few remaining examples of the Victorian period retail-and-residential building typology. Saved from demolition by the Auckland Council''s Built Heritage Acquisition Fund, the current owners of the building propose to partially refurbish the existing building and erect a new fourteen-storey apartment tower above. This thesis provides an alternative solution for the Thomas Doo Building that explores the adaptive re-use approach of heritage conservation theory through the combination of heritage fabric and music performance. From its prime location immediately adjacent to Auckland''s performance hub, the site is ideally suited to re-use as a recital hall. The design adapts the existing building into a mixed-use foyer space and café-bar-restaurant with the addition of a 578 seat recital hall along Cook Street. The alterations and additions retain the integrity and significance of the historic building, addressing the need to keep the building relevant without overwhelming the prominent two-storey city placeholder. Without directly copying, the contemporary form makes reference to qualities in the original Thomas Doo Building design such as scale, materiality and architectural details, engendering a sense of continuity throughout. This thesis presents the new addition as a subtle counterpoint to the existing, allowing the design integrity of both architectural languages to remain discernable and relevant.

Memory is a large component of computer system cost and current trends indicate this cost is increasing as a fraction of the total. Emerging applications such as in-memory databases, virtual machines, and big-data key-value stores demand more memory relative to compute. Some of these high-memory applications incidentally store many duplicate values in memory: in some cases, duplicates account for over 75% of the total. Recent work on the HICAMP architecture provided a sophisticated hardware mechanism for memory deduplication to implement memory versioning, but without support for current software stacks. This thesis extends work on HICAMP by evaluating a deduplicated memory that is compatible with existing hardware and software. Memory content from actual workloads indicates that deduplicated memory effectively doubles capacity. After understanding the baseline cost-benefit tradeoff in terms of capacity, performance, and energy, this work proposes novel optimizations for machines with deduplicated memory. These optimizations reduce memory traffic and improve performance relative to both the baseline deduplicated memory and, in many cases, relative to the original machine. Energy consumption is reduced because memory devices are reduced with no penalty to performance. Further, deduplication reduces data transfer and improves performance for certain scientific applications. This thesis argues that in-memory deduplication is warranted by its own benefits, which are likely to grow in the future, and that it enables low-cost memory snapshots, as in the HICAMP architecture.