Eugenia Loli Archive

"In the GNOME philosophy, we want applications that do their job, only their job, and we want those to do it perfectly. Epiphany's job is to browse the web. Only browsing the web. But browsing the web in a GNOME fashioned way." Read more here and also here.

"Intel’s Developer Forum (IDF) for Spring 2006 has a rather obvious focus: the announcement of Intel's next generation microarchitecture. Intel’s new core will almost certainly leapfrog arch-rival AMD for integer and commercial computing performance. That alone should make this IDF one of the most exciting in the last several years."

On Monday, Microsoft updated the four-month-old Beta 1 version of Microsoft Office 2007 with a "Technical Refresh" version. Office has shed the preliminary name "Microsoft Office 12" for its final name, Microsoft Office 2007, and sports an improved version of the new ribbon interface. This Technical Refresh represents the first version of Office 2007 to run under Windows Vista.

"In twenty odd years of working with computers, I never owned an Apple computer. Frankly, until OSX, I was never interested. But the BSD underpinnings of OSX got my attention. The Mac finally got a "real" operating system. It was interesting enough that several years after it debuted, I purchased my first Apple computer on eBay, a Mac Mini, to dig a little deeper into the OS. Not only did Apple do something right with OSX, but it was smart marketing to introduce a cheap Mac that worked with PC hardware. It is squarely aimed at Windows switchers and the mildly curious like myself. I would never have considered springing for a full-blown iMac or iBook as a learning exercise, but a used Mini fit the budget."

IBM researchers Singh, Smith & Reed are developing in their free time legacy BIOS support for Intel Macs. "BAMBIOS" is using Boch's BIOS emulation code and has also adapted its graphical BIOSes for the current ATi and Intel graphics chipsets used on the Intel Macs today. The BIOS itself loads as a small EFI-capable OS that then chainloads to a second stage boot manager to then boot non-EFI OSes (editor's note: In the past some unsupported VESA 1.2 PC users used a small DOS partition to load a special DOS-based "VESA 2.0 graphics bios" code that was preparing the way for what BeOS was expecting and then it was chainloading the BeOS from DOS). BAMBIOS is a very promising project to bring Windows and non-EFI Unices to the Mac platform, although the downside is that you most likely need updated versions for it for each new Mac released - if the Mac hardware has changed from its previous models that is. And if the trick used is indeed chainloading, then some quirky re-partitioning of the drive will be required by the user too. Update: Additional info from Amit Singh below.

Mark Mitchell announced the availability of GCC 4.0.3. He explains, "this release is a bug-fix release for problems in GCC 4.0.2. GCC 4.0.3 contains changes to correct regressions from previous releases, but no new features." GCC 4.0.2 was released nearly 6 months ago in September of 2005. GCC 4.1.0 was released in early March of 2006.

Aspect-oriented programming is more than just a clever means of adding tracing to in-field code. The language has matured to a point where it can support both development-time and production-time code aspects. Stephen Morris briefly provides some background and then shows you how to get productive quickly with AspectJ.

In this example, Randi J. Rost applies a brick pattern to an object. The brick pattern is calculated entirely within a fragment shader. This example consists of three essential components: the source code for the vertex shader, the source code for the fragment shader, and the application code that initializes and uses these shaders. It focuses on the vertex and fragment shaders.

Matchbox is an Open Source base environment for the X Window System running on non-desktop embedded platforms such as handhelds, set-top boxes, kiosks and anything else for which screen space, input mechanisms or system resources are limited. Information on the 1.0 release is here.

Microsoft revealed today that it will not support EFI booting for Windows Vista on its launch. The news will be a shock for owners of Intel Macs who had hoped they would be able to dual-boot between Windows Vista and OS X. Intel Macs only support booting via EFI.

"It's been a while since I last reviewed Gentoo Linux because there haven't been too many significant changes in the past few releases. I've been using it as my primary desktop operating system for a year and a half, though, and I've been running my main Web/email/database server on it since October of 2004. There's a reason why I've stayed with it that long, both as a desktop and server OS - and there's also a reason why I'm writing a review of the 2006.0 release after a long hiatus from Gentoo reviews." More here.

GNU Classpath 0.90 "A La Mort Subite" has been released. Some highlights of this release: JTables can be rearranged and resized. Free Swing text components support highlighting and clipboard. Much improved styled text. Fast event dispatching and lower memory consumption. Better support for mixing lightweight and heavyweight components in AWT containers. GNU Crypto and Jessie cryptographic algorithms have been added providing ssl3/tls1 and https support. Unicode 4.0.0 support. GIOP and RMI stub and tie source code tools. XML validaton support for RELAX NG and W3C XML schemas. New file backend for util.prefs. Updated gnu.regexp from POSIX to util.regex syntax.

Design flaws account for 50% of security problems. You can’t find design defects by staring at code—a higher-level understanding is required. That’s why architectural risk analysis plays an essential role in any solid software security program. Find out more about architectural risk analysis in this sample chapter. Also, Matthew Heusser and Sean McMillan are convinced that it takes smart people to develop good software that makes money. Where do you find smart people? You don't find them; you make them! Matt and Sean provide some fundamental rules for doing just that.

In .NET 1.0, the DataGrid control was the primary Windows Forms control for presenting tabular data. Even though that control had a lot of capability and could present basic tabular data well, it was fairly difficult to customize many aspects of the control. Additionally, the DataGrid control didn’t expose enough information to the programmer about the user interactions with the grid and changes occurring in the grid due to programmatic modifications of the data or formatting. Due to these factors and a large number of new features that customers requested, the Windows Client team at Microsoft decided to introduce a replacement control for the DataGrid in .NET 2.0. That new control, the DataGridView control, is the focus of this chapter.