Monthly Archive:: March 2009

"A number of folks have asked me what tools and techniques I use to reverse engineer Cocoa executables. I thought it would be worth taking some time out from documenting undocumented APIs to show you how easy it is to do the same thing for yourself. With all these tools in your arsenal, reverse engineering Cocoa executables is actually very simple. In fact, it's a good deal more straightforward than most Windows executables, with the exception of Delphi and .NET where - like Cocoa - a good deal of runtime type information is contained within the executable."

Apple held an event today announcing some of the new features coming in iPhone OS v3. Thee were loads and loads of new features, but the big ones are cut/copy/paste functionality, push notifications (I guess most developers will believe it when they finally see it), spotlight search, and many others.

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is one of the most important technologies in the graphics arena. Since Flex inherits most of its features from Flash, it has very good support for vector drawing. This article introduces you to the fascinating world of SVG in Flex. It teaches you how to create custom graphics and build appealing flashy components just by vector drawing.

These 5 articles on PHP frameworks will get you quickly familiar with Zend, symfony, and CakePHP. This series is designed for PHP developers who want to start using a PHP framework, but have not examined the available frameworks in detail. You will examine their similarities and differences while building and extending a sample application using Ajax and by integrating external tasks.

Recently, I learned that there are two types of zombies. You have the undead ones, that have arisen from the grave, probably a little disappointed in the afterlife, and who come back to eat your brain (which indicates that the afterlife really must suck if it compares unfavourably to eating brains). Then there's the virus type of zombie, you know, from Resident Evil and 28 Days Later. Left 4 Dead sports the latter variety, but really, does anyone even care? Zombie mayhem!

Hadoop, the same software that lies at the heart of successful companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and others, has been proven time and again with said companies to be a successful data management server, keeping data secure and fault-free spread across multiple servers. It isn't the easiest piece of software to configure, however, which is why the Cloudera company has just announced a freely downloadable and easier to use custom distribution of Hadoop to bring the power of entities like Google to smaller businesses.

"Over the weekend, I put Windows 7 build 7000 on my desktop and Windows 7 build 7057 on my laptop, and went through trying to spot as many changes between the two as I could. Although I go deeper than I did with build 7048, this is still not a comprehensive list. There is almost three months difference between the two builds: the beta was compiled on December 12, 2008, at 2:00pm and the leaked build 7057 was compiled on March 5, 2009, at 8:00pm, so there's a lot of work to cover. This post is about tracking every noticeable visual change; although I do mention some fixes here and there, I'm mainly focusing on tweaks that are "tangible" as opposed to the thousands of bugs that have been fixed."

As was widely expected, Cisco Systems on Monday unveiled its Unified Computing effort, including the company's move to offer its own server hardware. The networking titan's Unified Computing System targets data centers, facilities where enterprises locate a hefty number of servers that host and run the technology side of their operations. It is designed to unify networking, computing, storage, and virtualization resources in order to streamline a company's resources, to reduce its total cost of ownership, and to "radically reduce" the number of devices requiring management, power/cooling, and other labor and financial expenditures.

Recently, AMD spun off its manufacturing business in a partnership with the Abu Dhabi government into Global Foundries. Apparently, Intel isn't very happy about this, and has said in correspondence to AMD that the patent cross-license agreement from 2001 has now been broken by AMD.

The GTK+ guys have released GTK+ 2.16. As always, this new release is source and binary compatible with the previous GTK+ release. In case you don't know: "GTK+ is a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces. Offering a complete set of widgets, GTK+ is suitable for projects ranging from small one-off tools to complete application suites."

PolishLinux has an editorial on program installation on Linux systems, and even though it's a bit hard to wade through (the author's native language sure isn't English) it does make a number of very good points in favour of the way most Linux systems handle things. Still, as always in the discussion on program installation, it always feels a bit like listening to a discussion between a deaf and a blind man about whose condition is the easiest to live with.

Fedora Project has been on the forefont of development and adoption of kernel mode setting to enhance the desktop linux experience by making fairly invasive infrastructure improvements that affect the interaction between Xorg and the Linux kernel. In the past, one of the common way to test Xorg performance has been to use glxgears. While that hasn't been a particular good way to do it ever, the switch to kernel mode setting for Intel drivers ahead of the Fedora 11 Beta release to be available shortly has exposed the fallacy of this. In short, don't use glxgears. There are better methods to assess performance.

During the 1970s, the Palo Alto Research Center was the hotspot for computer technology, with various important technological advances in computing coming from these Xerox labs. One of those advances was a humble cable and associated protocols: ethernet was born. El Reg interviewed one of the inventors and the driving force behind ethernet, Bob Metcalfe.

The whole FAT licensing saga between Microsoft and TomTom just got a whole lot more complicated. Microsoft sued TomTom because the satnav maker had not licensed FAT from Microsoft, even though several others have. This left TomTom in a difficult position: not license it, and face legal penalties - license it, and violate the GPL. The second part, however, is up for debate now: the terms under which Microsoft licenses FAT may not violate the GPL at all. Near-instant update: On Slashdot, Bruce Perens and Jeremy Allison have explained that the FAT terms are still a GPL violation. Allison accidentally emailed the journalist who wrote this story with the wrong information.