Piet is a programming language in which programs are expressed as abstract art.

Testing 101 is a very good place to start if you know very little about testing and unit testing and feel you need to learn it, which you should unless you are retarded but the presentation makes that clear.

Well Oiled by Matt Dixon

Testing Private Methods with JUnit and SuiteRunner addresses the issue of testing private methods effectively.

RailsWTF is a tumblelog that aggregates weird Ruby messages.

A Taxonomy for “Bad Code Smells” is a condensed list of code smells grouped into categories and discussed briefly.

CodeCity is a source code visualization tool that presents the source tree as a 3D city.

How to Think About the “new” Operator with Respect to Unit Testing is an excellent introduction to dependency injection and why you need it. Also read How to Write 3v1L, Untestable Code.

Reboot like a racecar with kexec, if you haven’t heard about kexec and you think rebooting your machine takes forever this article is for you.

November 17, 2008 7:00

Yesterday, Google added video and audio chat to gmail. There are undoubtedly millions of people that will come to use the system. It may even be as popular as Skype one day.

That's Matt!
Genesi, Manager, Developer Relations

Questions:

1. Will Google talk be extended to traditional phone systems as an outbound calling feature?

2. As the FCC in the USA voted last week to free the frequencies between television channels to create a wireless broadband service (Vote for broadband in 'white spaces'), will we see more WiFi available as fewer base stations are needed for better coverage at lower cost?

Potential results:

1. Tough going for Skype and eBay.

2. Less people will need a mobile phone.

Things sure are moving ahead quickly. How about video email? Just imagine the service options and marketing opportunities...

The Community is the Computer - a Super Computer. Go Zig!

R&B

November 12, 2008 15:16

After a busy week we might as well pick up where we left off: the concept of Cell processors and International Business Machines Corp. v. Papermaster, 08-cv-9078, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (White Plains). After 25 years of undoubtedly loyal service, IBM said in a court filing that Mark Papermaster had agreed to avoid working for any competitor for a year if he left IBM. Papermaster argued that there were significant differences between between the two companies because they address different markets. IBM disagreed: "Electronic devices large and small are powered by the same type of intelligence, the microprocessor." IBM must see Apple as serious competition.

We all remember when Apple left PowerPC

Of course, the Power Architecture (formally known as PowerPC) actually got started at IBM. In the 90's Apple, IBM, Motorola formed AIM. Within a few years Apple left the AIM alliance, but continued to use PowerPC processors in its computers. Apple announced the move to Intel in 2005. IBM still produces and licenses the Power Architecture. IBM also uses Intel processors in its products.

One company that licensed and produced a CPU based on the Power Architecture in the last few years was PASemi. Earlier this year, PASemi was purchased by Apple. Nevertheless, we do not think this surprisingly public and legal matter is about the Power Architecture. Apple folks (including those from PASemi that probably worked closely and recently with Papermaster) know at least as much about what is important today as anyone from IBM. There is a bigger story here.

To get a feeling where things are headed, have a look at what Intel is doing: Intel Announces its First Home Medical Device to Better Connect Clinicians with Patients. Read this: Additionally, Intel plans to use the core technology components of the solution to build products targeted for new areas such as independent living and programs for health and wellness management and to support new devices such as mobile phones and handhelds. We don't think Intel will stop there.

The Jobs-Papermaster-PaSemi team won't stop with the next iPod Touch-iPhone-Mac either. The first public signs of significant change are starting to surface. IBM has much to lose. Consumers and companies will decide what software, services and support they need through the devices they use. This directly relates to the Cell concepts discussed in All Aboard! The supply chain begins with the customer. Didn't Google teach us that once already? We are on the way...

The Community is the Computer - a Super Computer. Go Zig!

R&B

November 10, 2008 11:10

Writing Insecure C, Part 1 helps you navigate the landscape of insecure C code and how to avoid the pitfalls.

Enforcing Code Feature Requirements in C++, Scott Meyers presents us with a couple of handy tools that can help enforce requirements in C++ code.

I Was Fired for Ordering the Cups by Sheern Tami

ISBNdb is a free ISBN database.

HOtMEfSPRIbNG, or “Hatchery Oblivion through Marshy Energy from Snowmelt Powers Rapids Insulated but Not Great“, is a programming language as seen through the eyes of a salmon moving through a system of rivers.

openBVE is a pretty advanced train simulator capable of using content from BVE.

Handy One-Liners for SED, there are a couple of things in here I had no idea that you could do with SED.

Continuous Integration by Martin Fowler is really the place to start when learning about how to use CI.

13 Photographs That Changed the World, 13 photographed that affected the world together with an explanation of what is going on.

November 10, 2008 7:00

Confessions of your worst WTF Moment. (What not to do.) is an interesting confessional that was posted over at Stack Overflow.

13 Useful Math Cheat Sheets, if you are like me and feel that the further away from school you get the less you remember of basic math these cheat sheets are for you.

"I, for one, welcome our pixelated Google overlords" by eboy

The case of the 500-mile e-mail, chances are that even the impossible is sometimes made possible.

Multi-Dimensional Analog Literals, because code was never readable anyway.

V12 RC-Engine, is a miniature V12 engine which is fully working. Impressive to say the least.

Using “super” in C++, I haven’t seen this before and it could actually be quite useful if implemented properly.

Starbucks Does Not Use Two-Phase Commit, they use an asynchronous stateless approach.

November 03, 2008 7:00

An interesting article was published yesterday: Apple hires top IBM chip designer and blade server guru. Lately, there has been a good deal of speculation about the future of Apple's PASemi SoC. This article and the lawsuit will bring more attention to the subject. While it seems challenging under these circumstances and others that the PASemi Power Architecture based processors as licensed from IBM would ever be able to get to market, there is clearly a desire by Apple to assemble a first rate team around something new.

In the meanwhile, Power.org has become an industry joke.

Everything 'semiconductor' will depend on high level of efficiency and performance. As Apple has demonstrated, the choice of processor core may not matter as much as it once did. What matters is the complete offering - from the processing core inside a well designed, firmware supported end-user device to the software and network it seamlessly uses/shares with everybody else doing whatever, wherever.

We wonder if we will see some of the basic ideas discussed in US Patent #6,809,734 start popping up in related discussions soon. Patent #6,809,734 is the Cell processor patent. Remember, "CELL" is three things: CPU, packaging of the data and application, and the way it is moved across the network. Cell technology was conceived to be more than just the processor. The Cell technology was to be a combination of CPU design, network management and how the software was organized and transmitted in a cell (as in a package) of applications and data.

The idea was that if all computers and computing devices on the network were constructed from a common computing module then there would be a totally pervasive solution - everyone could get everything, everywhere. The objective was that this common computing module had a consistent structure and would employ the same instruction set architecture (ISA). This meant that the members of the network, e.g., clients, servers, PCs, mobile computers, game machines, PDAs, mobile phones, set top boxes, digital televisions and/or other devices, would use the same core computer processor logic insuring compatibility. The consistent modular structure would enable efficient, high speed processing of applications and data by the network's members and the rapid transmission of applications and data over the network.

The Cell Patent suggested a new programming model for transmitting data and applications over a network and for processing data and applications among the network's members (vs. data just being transferred between stand alone devices that must run the same application software to process and display the data sent). This programming model would employ a software cell that would be transmitted over the network for processing by any of the network's members (some to a higher degree and some to a lesser degree). Each software cell would have the same structure and contain both applications and data. As all computing resources on the network would have the same basic structure and employ the same ISA any particular resource performing the processing could be located anywhere on the network and dynamically assigned to the activity required.

Well, enough for today. Maybe, the ISA will matter. Maybe, there was a reason Apple selected the name Grand Central. Can you make the connection? Well, who knows!? Let's see what happens as the evolution continues...

Oh, and someone please get us a copy of those Court records as they become available. It should make for some interesting reading.

The Community is the Computer - a Super Computer. Go Zig!

R&B

October 31, 2008 10:49

We are using some Ruby on Rails applications at work and I’m impressed with how well they all work so I decided to install it on my private server as well. I’m using Ruby from Sunfreeware but they do not provide a packaged RubyGems. Considering it has its own package management I decided to install it manually.

I followed the installation instructions and executed “sudo ruby setup.rb –prefix=/usr/local” which proceeded to install gems into /usr/local/lib/rubygems. After the installation completed I executed gem in order to see that it had installed correctly but was greeted by:

bash-2.05$ gem
/usr/local/bin/gem:8:in `require': no such file to load -- rubygems (LoadError)
        from /usr/local/bin/gem:8

Which wasn’t quite what I had expected. After some googling I found that in order to get a list of dirs which ruby looks for libraries in you should execute “ruby -e ‘puts $:’” which produced:

/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/sparc-solaris2.9
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby
/usr/local/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.8
/usr/local/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.8/sparc-solaris2.9
/usr/local/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8
/usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/sparc-solaris2.9

As you can see /usr/local/lib is not in this list so I moved rubygems, rubygems.rb, ubygems.rb and rbconfig to /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8.

After these steps I was able to run gem and I performed a successful install of rake.

October 29, 2008 12:42

There is a WSJ article today, which essentially covers the same issues we discussed last week. If you can read it, go ahead and have a look: Time to Leave the Laptop Behind (that link should work for a few days).

Remember this?

If so, check this out: EETimes, 20 October 2008

When you get there please turn to Page 26

How about the ED, do you remember this STB?
BTW, that picture is from 1996.

October 27, 2008 11:59

Smile to QuickBird, a russian city organizes a cool Google Earth/Maps hack.

The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time, Technologizer takes us back through time to look at the thirteen greatest and least useful error messages.

Lego V8 by Brickshelf

the commentator, time commenting could be time coding. Non-free windows software but I still find it funny.

JLog is a thread and process safe message queue which utilizes journaling to assure delivery of messages.

The Sprite Resource holds a library of sprites captured from various popular games.

SqueakNOS is an attempt at removing the operating system underneath squeak.

TequilaCat Book Reader is a free book reader for alla Java-enabled phones.

October 27, 2008 7:00

Earlier this week at the smartphoneshow in London, Nokia (NYSE:NOK) EVP, Kai Oistamo said, "It's time to recognize that today's smart phones are full-fledged computers. We should call them what they really are." You can read up on the rest of the interview at EETimes - Nokia's naked ambition: Moving beyond cellphones. Oistamo had changed the title of his speech from The Future of Smartphones to The Future of Computing.

In the meanwhile, the IBM (NYSE:IBM) Institute for Business Value published Go mobile, grow... The question: Should mobile Internet services be the next big growth gamble for mobile device makers? For the record, we think they overlooked digital coupons (see The Cost of Living). Both the EETimes article and the IBM Study are worth reading.

Remember the 5150?
How about the Simon, do you remember the Simon?

Here is another quote, this time from Steve Jobs after this past week's quarterly conference call: "I think that the traditional game in the phone market has been to produce a voice phone in a hundred different varieties. But, as software starts to become the differentiating technology of this product category, I think that people are going to find that a hundred variations presented to a software developer is not very enticing. And most of the competitors in this phone business do not really have much experience in a software platform business."

Do you think folks understand that Apple is a software platform company first and a hardware vendor as a means to an end? Hardware, whether PC or mobile, is only a commodity business if you approach the market that way. Just because the 5150 and Simon were not big hits does not mean it is not time to revisit the opportunity. The Newton was not a successful, but the iPhone is. Just why is that? With the new PASemi-Apple SoC there will be a software platform that will change the industry and a massive disintermediation of the long-standing companies that understood the new rules too late will begin. Others will follow Apple, but others will have a lot of catching up to do.

The Community is the Computer - a Super Computer. Go Zig!

R&B

October 25, 2008 16:06

Good work, Michal.
Let's get EFIKA support released!

AROS EFIKA Bounty
$3156.00

Yet another status update can be found on the blog of Michal Schulz. More good news: in order to be able to install AROS on EFIKA, Michal needs a bootable device connected through USB, so he has also been assigned the USB Mass Storage Bounty at power2people for what is roughly another $200 $300 (updated). Please give Michal your support and contribute to the bounties. Thank you all!

The Community is the Computer - a Super Computer. Go Zig!

R&B

October 23, 2008 10:00

2.6 million computers, 11 million iPods and nearly 7 million iPhones were sold by Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) during the three months that ended with September. Apple also has $25 billion in the Bank and no debt. It was slightly more than ten years ago that Michael Dell said, "I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders,” when asked what he would do if he was put in charge of Apple. Today, Apple has more cash than the entire market value of Dell (NASDAQ:DELL). Said another way, Apple could offer $12.50 a share for Dell and if shareholders accepted the money, Apple could close the world's second largest PC vendor. Dell was the world's largest PC vendor until 2006. Before that, it was IBM. Can you see the trend?

In other news this morning Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) market capitalization is roughly the same as IBM's (NYSE:IBM). Did you know that in addition to formally being a vendor of their own PC, IBM used to make rifles too?

M1 carbine made by IBM

Apple and Google are good examples of innovative companies that have become well-managed businesses. IBM and Dell are well-managed businesses that are not very innovative. Did you see that Lotus Notes is now available in the cloud for a monthly service charge?! Wow! Good work, guys! Now, that's innovation. You keep that up. We would not want any of you forward-thinking corporate executives to loose your jobs or damage your retirement plans as you drive a global icon into the dirt. BTW, have you ever tried Google Apps?

Thank goodness the evolution continues even if not at IBM. Good work Apple. You inspire us. You too Google, thanks!

The Community is the Computer - a Super Computer. Go Zig!

R&B

October 22, 2008 15:02

The Ten Greatest Hacks of All Time lists some of the coolest hacks of our time. Ben Heckendorn made the list, one of the greatest hardware hackers of this decade.

From "Best images of January 2008"

Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1, an article showing how Softimage is being used in the design of Metal Gear Solid 4.

Review: EFiX Dongle Perfectly Transforms PC to Mac, Gizmodo takes a look at the EFiX dongle. I wonder how long this thing will last before Apple quashes it.

Refactorings in Alphabetical Order, a simple list of refactorings. This is one of those lists that are handy to have bookmarked.

Run Mac OS X on an Eee PC, and you thought everything that could run on an Eee PC already was.

ViEmu, vi/vim emulation for a broad range of microsoft products. If your hand has been forced at least you can make the applications work with you.

Uninformed, “Informative Information for the Uninformed“. The title says it all, almost. A site with various information collected through reverse engineering and similar practices.

October 20, 2008 7:00

This board can support some great new developments

We let you know more, when we can. In the meanwhile, stay posted on the related PowerDeveloper thread. And, please feel free to post your interest and enthusiasm on the board's prospects. Varoom, is right!

The Community is the Computer - a Super Computer. Go Zig!

R&B

October 18, 2008 14:53

Markets go up and down, but the demand for technology has been continuous and progressive for the last 20 years. The trend is toward mobility. The consumer expectation is whatever can be had at home/on a desktop or television can be had wherever -- following an evolution similar to the rotary telephone connected by a cord to a handset to wireless handsets to the mobile phone of today.

The trend is still up

The Internet has extended and is extending the possibilities with the concentration of media that is measurable, social networking, intelligent devices and with the advent of IPv6 a secure and vast communications protocol that will fuel another level of significant growth.

Entire computers systems are being converted into single integrated microprocessors. This new package has been labeled as a system-on-a-chip or a SoC. The integration of CPU, graphics, networking and other functions is being done to lower cost of acquisition and use, increase mobility and leverage the Internet.

The same market pressure/opportunity is driving industry leaders to shrink the size and thickness of the silicon being used to produce these next generation chips. The smaller the transistors, the more discrete the digital signal and the less power required. What was once the domain of embedded system design is becoming increasingly mainstream.

We still need analogue I/O

This integration has leveled the 'playing field' as an Intel-Microsoft combination is at a disadvantage in the new environment. Traditionally, strong companies such as Dell and HP are also in jeopardy. Dell is selling its factories and HP has bought EDS in order to insure steady services revenue and a distribution channel for its computing platforms and printers. Having the ability to fully control the complete computer development, insuring hardware and software are completely integrated, is the key to success.

Security is at issue. Identity theft and fraudulent transactions, as well as piracy of digital property are challenges not yet resolved. Hardware encrypted security embedded into a SoC is both a solution to protect IP and a barrier to entry for competitors.

The financial requirements necessary to produce such small, low-power SoCs is driving the industry to consolidation. This situation has created pockets of opportunity.

The Community is the Computer - a Super Computer. Go Zig!

R&B

October 16, 2008 6:44

We have a SLES server running at work and recently we’ve had issues with the groupware server failing to respond during certain hours of the day. After some sleuthing I found out that it is caused by the backup scripts for the database server. At first glance you might think that the database is being locked during the backup process but it happens even if I’m just copying the (transaction) log files using cp so I’m blaming it on the really slow drives in that particular server.

Now I wanted to reschedule the cron jobs so at least they would run the backups during off hours but no matter how much I googled I couldn’t find any good information on how to do this. The server is running ISC cron and the crontab only points to run-crons which in turn executes the scripts in /etc/cron.{daily|weekly|monthly}. After some more manual labor I found out run-crons is just a script and as it turns out it simply touches files in /var/spool/cron/lastrun whenever it runs a job in order to keep tack of when to run it again.

I’ve never had to fake creation times of files in a Unix system so again I turned to Google and apparently the answer is really quite simple. The touch command has an option, -t, which allows you to set the timestamp of the files rather than just fetching the current system time so I just modified the time of the cron files to some nice value in the middle of the night when very few people access the groupware system and vóila, problem solved!

October 14, 2008 15:22

ASCII Table - The Pronunciation Guide, get your syllables straight!

EmailaCar.com, leave a public message for any car in the world.

Design, Modeling and Fabrication of the Möbius Gear by Aaron M. Hoover

One Day I Chanced Upon a Mystery at a local dollar store market. A photo story written in witty language by a guy who happened to chance upon a couple of mystery bags.

Stupid htaccess Tricks for your everyday Apache needs it’s a superb resource.

Portable AirConditioner, build your own rather than buying an expensive one.

Crunching your abs, taking a look at how min, max and abs are related mathematically.

Land of the Free, Steve Schofield has photographed nerds in their natural habitat doing what they do best.

October 13, 2008 7:00

Let's get the atlas...

For years, we have kept a box of coins collected from all over the world. As we travel, we collect new ones. The Euro has made a dent in our diversity, but whenever we have young visitors who often have more energy than their parents or our four walls can contain alone, we pull out the box, and an atlas.

Here is a map of the world. If you can figure out where at least twenty different coins from twenty different countries come from and locate each of those countries on the map, you can keep any coin you like...

Depending on how many children there are or how long they will be visiting, you may need another map or a greater incentive - find the origin of every coin and take ten home to start your own collection! This has proven to be an ideal technique. It rarely fails and works for hours. Often, young returning friends ask for the coins on arrival.

In the last months, we wrote What is in your Wallet? and The Cost of Living. The latest financial upheavals have led us back to these musings. We wonder if a single currency for the world would be a good thing. We pretty much agree on weights and measures. We mostly agree on Olympic events and records, even in/on hundredths of a second. And, though our collection of pesetas, lira, drachmas, pfennigs, guilders, and various francs has been progressively diminished, the Euro has been successful in many respects.

Nevertheless, the more we think about it, the more we are inclined to believe we are all still too different in our views of value, of government and leaders, of social welfare, of commerce and trade, and let's face it, some countries have more natural resources than others. Then there are contingencies, such as weather and war. Short of a unanimous United Nations decision to ordain the concept which seems quite unlikely, there are far too many variables that exist today between currencies to expect anything other than supply and demand to determine value at any moment.

One day, if we are all well enough connected, supply and demand might actually do the trick. What has happened to the currencies of Australia, Brazil and Iceland in the last three months is not a good thing for these populations. Simplification and efficiency has been a driving force of economic progress throughout modern history. Increased transparency invites more competition and for the consumer, competition is a good thing. Low cost (to acquire and use) communication computing resources are needed for another couple of billion people. Once we have that task managed and another round of information metamorphosis is underway, we may finally be able to achieve the concept of ideal money.

The Community is the Computer - a Super Computer. Go Zig!

R&B

October 13, 2008 6:11

The Common Platform Technology Forum was hosted by Chartered (NASDAQ:CHRT), IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Samsung (SEO:005930) on 30 September 2008. Nearly 2000 industry representatives attended. The IBM alliance to align on R&D collaboration has expanded to include integrated device manufacturers (STM, Freescale, Infineon, NEC, Toshiba), microprocessor manufacturers (AMD, IBM) and foundries (Samsung, Chartered) as well as fabless customers using the process (Qualcomm, Broadcom). The growing alliance is creating an alternative to TSMC, which retains the technology and financial leadership (FYI: the 5121e is produced at TSMC). TSMC currently holds almost a 70% share of the revenue being generated by the top four foundries at 130nm and below.

The Future is Fusion

...was that fusion with or without the fab?

We want a Dick Tracy watch!

October 09, 2008 12:27

This was the main theme of the Freescale Press Release last Thursday. It is an interesting announcement, because the focus is actually on what is not growing; that is, the cellular chipset market, at least for Freescale.

Can the technology keep up with the growth?

Global chip sales driven by PC, mobile phone markets

September 19, 2008, Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA):

Worldwide sales of semiconductors increased by 7.6 percent in July, boosted primarily by the expanding consumer electronics, PC and mobile phone markets. Sales of chipsets grew to $22.2 billion in July 2008 from $20.6 billion in July 2007. Worldwide semiconductor sales for the year through the end of July increased 5 percent to $148.3 billion as compared against $141.3 billion in 2007. Month-over-month sales climbed 2.8 percent from $21.6 billion in June.

Growth is being driven by strong demand for LCD panels for television sets, digital set-top boxes and digital still cameras, as well as steady demand for PCs and mobile phones. These markets accounted for about 80 percent of chip demand. In the consumer electronics market, sales of LCD TVs, digital set-top boxes and digital still cameras are still expected to post new gains. Sales of LCD TVs are projected to increase by 32 percent this year, while sales of digital still cameras and set-top boxes are estimated to rise by nearly 20 percent.

The total semiconductor sales products increased by 11.6 percent year-on-year and by 3.2 percent sequentially, despite the decline in prices of DRAMs and NAND flash memories. While the global sales of DRAMs and NAND flash memory declines, the memory content of typical PCs and cell phones continues to increase.

In the meanwhile, according to Micron Technology (Public, NYSE:MU), the DRAM bit content of the average PC in 2008 will increase by 56 percent, while the NAND flash content for the average cell phone will grow by 178 percent. Last week, Micron announced its quarterly loss doubled, which was worse than expected as sales slowed and prices fell in the face of a memory chip supply glut.

So, once again, what is wrong with this picture? Is there a market for our environmentally friendly, low temperature, low power, high performance, kind-of-computing, or not?

There was another Freescale announcement last week, and perhaps not a moment too soon: Freescale offers customization across SoC platforms to help customers streamline unique product development. After all this time, we might have actually found a mutually pleasing and beneficial way to get these growth ambitions moving in the right direction.

The Community is the Computer - a Super Computer. Go Zig!

R&B

October 06, 2008 20:36

Amazingly Simple Home Remedies to some of life’s common problems.

Origin of Quake3’s Fast InvSqrt(), an analysis of the function for finding the inverse square root in Quake 3.

Continuous Integration Enhancement: The Broken Build Token! presents a cute idea for “punishing” whoever broke the latest build.

Git Quick Reference and Git - SVN Crash Course, being somewhat of a Git newbie I find these simple resources highly useful.

October 06, 2008 7:00

One particular problem in programming is when you have a thread which only serves the purpose of doing some trivial repetetive work in a timely manner. Most often these threads are implemented as:

while (isRunning) {
    doSimpleJob();
    sleep(Seconds(1));
}

In a perfect world all threads wait for signals rather than implementing this kind of busy-wait polling but when you need something simple like above I believe something as simple as busy-wait could be considered good enough in most cases.

The purpose of the sleep in the case stated above is to ensure that if doSimpleJob() completes in very few ticks we won’t end up unintentionally starving other threads while doing our trivial low priority task.

The downside to this is that if it is difficult to determine how long doSimpleJob() takes to complete, i.e. if it’s waiting for I/O, it will also be difficult to set a good timeout for sleep. If it takes five seconds to complete the job there is hardly no need to sleep for another second, and maybe you even want to run it again as fast as you can if it took a long time to complete. The solution I’m proposing is to implement a type that can determine how long we should sleep, if at all. Some pseudocode:

class Throttle {
public:
    Throttle(Milliseconds timeout) :
        m_start(Time::now()),
        m_timeout(timeout) { }

    void sleep() {
        Milliseconds duration(Time::now() - m_start);
        if (duration < m_timeout) {
            sleep(m_timeout - duration);
       }
    }

private:
    Time m_start;
    Milliseconds m_timeout;
}

Using this implementation the example mentioned above would become:

while (isRunning) {
    Throttle throttle(Seconds(1));
    doSimpleJob();
    throttle.sleep();
}

Now if doSimpleJob() takes less than a second one loop iteration would not take up more than one second and if it takes more than a second it will be instantly restarted.

One danger to this is that if doSimpleJob() is computation bound rather than I/O bound it might end up starving threads if it takes more time than the throttle timeout so it has to be applied with care.

For the sake of the argument lets assume that the implementation of sleep() being used actually sleeps for the whole duration of the specified time, no more no less.

October 01, 2008 16:59

Michal Schulz has published an AROS on EFIKA update to his blog:

AROS on Efika status update

power2people.org seems to be adjusting to all the new AROS activity just fine. The newest bounty for the Poseidon USB Stack has been assigned to Chris Hodges. We have added $1000 to that bounty this morning.

We appreciate the great news from Michal. We will be looking for a way to engage Michal's support for the port once it is done and we move ahead.

The Community is the Computer - a Super Computer. Go Zig!

R&B

October 01, 2008 7:14

Graphical User Interface Gallery is a collection of screenshots from several desktop platforms and operating systems.

Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures contains a rather comprehensive database of algorithms (and data structures). The library is maintained by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

The Kernel Boot Process by Gustavo Duarte explains the Linux kernel boot process on an x86 platform. Very well written with descriptive and good looking diagrams.

Tristan Perich : 1-Bit Music, this guy goes on an exploration into the truly minimalistic by building an electronic circuit that plays 1-bit music.

About the British, some really funny quotes from British newspapers and things heard on the subway.

DUI test Perfect Score, a guy appears to be intoxicated but passes all the tests. I can’t tell whether this is fake or not but I still found it really funny. (requires Flash)

Preventing SPAM in Form Submissions without using a CAPTCHA by using various techniques in order to figure out that it is a bot and not a human.

September 29, 2008 7:00

Stack Overflow

Joel Spolky’s (Joel on Software) and Jeff Atwood’s (Coding Horror) new site, Stack Overflow, has finally opened its doors to the public. It’s a collaboratively edited QA site for programmers (think moderated news groups meet wikipedia) which from day one already has a ton of useful information.

If you are a programmer I highly recommend that you keep a link to Stack Overflow in your toolbox.

September 24, 2008 16:31

Top Ten worst uses for Windows, PC World takes a look at ten cases of the wrong tool for the job. Clearly some serious pruning needs to be done in the world of IT workers.

worms.c: formatting of complicated conditionals, Kragen Javier Sitaker takes a scheme approach to rewrite an especially ugly passage of code from worms (bsd-games).

Apartment Block by Don Ellis

More C++ Idioms is a wikibook aimed at people with an intermediate knowledge in C++ that want to exceed to the next level.

New otto malloc helps spot ancient bugs by moving some allocations to the end of a page. This particular bug was found in yacc(1) and appears to have existed there since 1975.

It’s the End for 3.11!! If you want to buy a copy of Windows 3.11 you better do it before November 1st 2008.

cpu-collection.de has a rather extensive library on CPUs and coprocessors. If you are interested in CPU history or just general information you should pay this site a visit.

old-computers.com is in line with cpu-collection.de but for computers, they complement each other pretty well.

Due to my current work load I don’t have much energy in the evenings. For that reason the tumblelog will only be updated once per week until my schedule clears up a bit.

September 22, 2008 7:00

Trinity University was created with the combination of three smaller colleges in 1869. While those colleges were affiliated with a Protestant religion, it does not seem that Trinity is named for the more fundamental doctrine.

It was nearly 75 years later when Trinity adopted the alumni and campus of the University of San Antonio. A few years later, the current campus was completed. And, just last week the new Embedded and Digital Systems Center was opened...

PC on the left; EFIKA on the right.

The new Embedded and Digital Systems Design Center
Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas

The Dell machines dual boot to Vista or Fedora. Currently, the EFIKA Open Clients have only openSUSE installed, but we will be adding a couple of other options soon. There are other plans as the Center develops...

As for hardware, the Toshiba board is next as it runs
the same firmware.

We are happy to be involved with the Trinity!

The Community is the Computer - a Super Computer. Go Zig!

R&B

September 19, 2008 19:57

Today is the Day, this is really creepy.

Macintosh on Nintendo DS, Ken Fager managed to install Macintosh System 6 on his Nintendo DS using an emulator.

Principles by Mike Malloy from Mind of Malloy.

MSDN Search Shows Mono Results, I wonder if it is accidental or intentional. Probably the former but you never can know for sure.

Pencil Project is a Firefox extension which allows you to make diagrams and prototype GUIs. It runs on top of Gecko but it is also available as a standalone application.

Nokia haptikos tactile touchscreen details emerge, it’s a touch screen that can raise parts of its surface in order to increase friction. The result being that you can feel which parts of the screen that you can interact with and which parts are only presenting information.

Cinema Redux is a method of compressing an entire movie into one large image. An interesting method that can be used, among other things, as a movie DNA.

A slightly advanced Introduction to Vim, for the everyday user of Vim who hasn’t reached the expert’s level yet.

September 19, 2008 7:00

I’ve been having some problems with the power windows on my car. They always go down but sometimes they refuse to go back up again. I started fiddling around with the haywire of cables located under the panel and eventually managed to get the windows to move again but while doing this I also found a very strange black box.

It doesn’t seem like the box was installed by GM. The electrical work can only be described as shoddy as the wires are all tangled up in a bundle and several of them had the insulation cut for no apparent reason.

The black box has “M3U Quasar” written on it along with “Milan - Italy”. There is a terminal block with a lot of wires attached to it along with two positional switches. The purpose of this box remains a mystery.

Here are a couple of poor pictures I took with my cell phone camera.

M3U Quasar (front)

M3U Quasar (back)

September 18, 2008 17:02

Nicehacks is a directory of open source/free software projects which are a little more interesting than the rest.

Hello, my name is: The annoying Flash Layer Bug, it’s signed by the entire Internet!

Ice by Hirmes

The Perfect Hawaii Chair will definately get you in shape thanks to it’s patented Hula motor. Watch as Ellen DeGeneres demonstrates it during her show. (the latter link requires Flash)

PICs in Space, build your own Space Invaders. Details how you can build your own games for the TV at a minimal cost. Includes full schematics and software.

Pending commits is a concept introduced by Andrés G. Aragoneses as a way to allow anyone to commit to subversion without actually having an account with write access to the repository. The commits are placed as pending and the user appointed as maintainer of the affected path will have to moderate the patch. Should prove an interesting concept to free software projects.

Reklamnyie Fishki, clever ads.

The Prime Number Pages is a good resource on everything about prime numbers. I especially recommend the prime number history page.

September 15, 2008 7:00