Monthly Archive:: March 2004

OpenBSD developer Ryan McBride explains the new firewall redundancy features in the upcoming OpenBSD 3.5 release in his article Firewall Failover with pfsync and CARP.

See the performance of native COM+ and .NET Enterprise Services components when applied to different activation and calling patterns. Get guidelines to make .NET Enterprise Services components execute just as quickly as C++ COM+ components, and get key recommendations to help you create high-performance .NET Enterprise Service components.

"To the surprise of few, Apple's Hypercard passed away quietly this week, after life support was finally withdrawn by the company. It had a run of over 16 years - though the last were in circumstances of at best benign neglect. Not a bad duration for a software product, but it still hurts to see it go, since I had some part in its gestation." Read the interesting atricle at PacificAVC.

What is C99? Who needs it? Is it available yet? The author discusses the 1999 revision of the ISO C standard, with a focus on the availability of new features on Linux and BSD systems.

Devicelogics, a company founded by former executives of Caldera and Lineo in Utah, says it has begun shipping version 8.0 of DR-DOS today. The company says the most significant enhancement in the latest version of this long-lived operating system is support for FAT32 large partitions, enabling DR-DOS "to keep up with market demand for DOS-based embedded solutions built on FAT32 platforms."

"In any relationship between two or more entities, the "small" issues usually are the big issues or at least they evovle into big issues. Several of these type of public engagements a month, every month, for several months will result in some harm to the psyche of the community and lesser confidence by the commercial interests who will deem them as a form of instability or unpredictability of the open source model." Read the editorial here by Taurayi Chitaukire.

Have you ever been using an Open Source application and noticed something horribly wrong? I have and as a skilled maintenance programmer it really tickles my fix-it bone. I know I could fix it if I wanted to but it's just so much effort. Usually it's only when a bug really annoys the hell out of me that I'll even go to the trouble of downloading the source code (or even finding out where I can download the source code from). In the rare moments that I have taken on the feat of fixing someone else's code I've found myself exercising my most mad maintenance programmer skills and I decided to make a little list.

Microsoft's chief software architect recently returned from one of his fabled "Think Weeks" full of ideas on mesh networking, unified networking and more, says eWEEK. Elsewhere, the Internet firms riding a 'mini bubble' said Gates. Update: Another one with Bill: "Hardware to Be Nearly Free in 10 Years".

Apple is now officially endorsing OpenAL and has provided a new branch of Mac OS X code which is now in OpenAL's CVS (it requires to install Apple's latest CoreAudio SDK before compiling).

Creating a popular new computing approach always seems to bring with it a familiar catch-22: security issues. And Web services is no exception.

Tudy Parghel sent us a link to the first part of Tom's Hardware's migration guide. It starts you down the path of migrating from Windows to Linux.

Test 2 of Fedora Core 2 is now available. You can download it from here or, if you want maximum speed, you can grab the torrent from the Duke LUG. BitTorrent info can be found here. Update: Great. Just spent 4 hours downloading the 4 Fedora CDs (md5sum'ed) and the first CD won't boot on a machine that is fully compatible (apparently it is a new bug, there is already a bug report about it). Fedora's poor testing before the distribution (even for a beta) continues to amaze me each time a new version is out.

Microsoft is set to release Monday a beta version of an update to its Windows CE operating system for handheld devices, set-top boxes and other limited-function computing devices. Update: Here is the press release.

With the release of kernel 2.6, Linux now poses serious competition to major RTOS vendors, such as VxWorks and WinCE, in the embedded market space. Linux 2.6 introduces many new features that make it an excellent operating system for embedded computing. Among these new features are enhanced real-time performance, easier porting to new computers, support for large memory models, support for microcontrollers and an improved I/O system.