Monthly Archive:: June 2009

This series is aimed at programming language aficionados. There's a lot of very abstract writing about programming languages and a lot of simple minded "language X sux!" style blog posts by people who know next to nothing about programming. What I feel is sorely missing is a kind of article that deliberately sacrifices the last 10% of precision that make the theoretical articles dry and long winded but still makes a point and discusses the various trade offs involved. This series is meant to fill that void and hopefully start a lot of discussions that are more enlightening than the articles themselves. I will point out some parallels in different parts of computing that I haven't seen mentioned as well as analyze some well known rules of thumb and link to interesting blogs and articles.

The StormOS developers have announced the first beta, codenamed "Hail", of their desktop-oriented Nexenta-based distribution. Building upon the Nexenta Core Platform, StormOS offers a polished XFCE desktop and a handful of lightweight desktop applications out of the box. This beta is available in both direct download and torrent links, you can find them here.

Futurama is coming back! The animated series, loved by many geeks, is the second show in the history of television to be brought back to life after a cancellation (the other one's Family Guy, also by Fox), mostly due to strong fan demand and very good sales from the series of direct-to-DVD films. Comedy Central ordered 26 new episodes to be made, and airing will start in mid-2010. Matt Groening, one of the two show's creators, said: "We're thrilled 'Futurama' is coming back. We now have only 25,766 episodes to make before we catch up with Bender and Fry in the year 3000."

Despite the beating Apple often receives for its controlling behaviour of the App Store and its Mac OS X EULA, the company really does know how to market itself and its products. At the WWDC in San Francisco, currently under way, the company found a very illustrative way of showing the sheer size and success of the App Store.

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of version 2.6.30 of the Linux kernel. "I'm sure we've missed something, and I know we have some regressions pending. At the same time, we do need the coverage of a eral release, and on the whole it looks pretty good. We've fixed a few regressions in the last few days, and there's always 2.6.30.x." The list of changes is interesting.

"As seen here, PF is now enabled by default. The default pf.conf will now pass in all traffic, except for TCP port 6000 normally used by remote-X11. By having the X server still listen on port 6000 but let PF block incoming packets that aren't coming from localhost you can still use local X sessions that needs to talk to the TCP port or runs through a port forward from remote, but at the same time don't expose your machine on the network. Recent changes to PF, like having packet reassembly enabled on all packets by default, will now help clean incoming traffic."

What is it about gadget geeks? If there's one obsession common to all the generations of geekdom, it's got to be the desire for unification of all needs into one tool. It started out modestly. Maybe with the guy who fashioned his flint so he could easily both scrape and cut the animal hide. Then there was the guy who first put a nail puller on the back of a hammer, and on to to the combination compass/signaling mirror, the Swiss Army Knife, Leatherman, and an astounding array of multi-purpose hand tools. But it was with the advent of electronic gadgets that things really started to get out of hand. Read on for a rumination on multi-purpose gadgets and a review of a combo DSL/Wi-Fi/VoIP router.

"The OpenSolaris Operating System has many features well suited for embedded systems now and in the future. The kernel is fully preemptable and multithreaded, it provides real-time capabilities, and the modular architecture is highly configurable. Because of these advanced capabilities, we feel there are interesting opportunities to extend OpenSolaris to new platforms, such as the ARM architecture. Therefore, we have created this project to configure the OS/Net (ON) consolidation to meet the requirements of embedded systems and to port OpenSolaris to the ARM platform." The first release of the ARM port of OpenSolaris is now available. Installation notes are available.

Apple isn't the only one coming up with some seriously aggressive pricing schemes; a leaked memo from Best Buy indicates that Microsoft is willing to price Windows 7 upgrades pretty low too, but not as low as Snow Leopard, though. Still, the memo includes some interesting facts and also reveals the dates for when the upgrade program runs. As usual with Microsoft, caveats and version complications. Also, a table comparing the various upgrade prices of both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard can be found inside.

The future of SkyOS, the closed-source alternative operating system, had been hanging by a thread for a long time now. Barely any releases, until they came to a grinding halt altogether and Robert Szeleney explained he was pondering the future of SkyOS, and where to take it from here. One of the main problems was a lack of driver support which really made development difficult. Well, this is a problem Szeleney might be able to fix.

At the WWDC today, Apple has lifted the veil on a number of features of its upcoming operating system, Snow Leopard. Most of the work on Snow Leopard has gone into under-the-hood technologies and optimisations, but there are also a number of interface tweaks. The company also updated some of its laptops, while also lowering their prices. We got all the news from MacRumorsLive.com.

For some inexplicable reason I missed the fact that one of my favourite operating systems saw a new release last month. On May 28 QNX Software Systems released QNX Neutrino RTOS 6.4.1 and the associated Momentics Tool Suite, also at version 6.4.1. Even though it's a point release, there's some really cool and new stuff in here.

The Palm Pre smartphone sold out in many locations, during its debut weekend, seemingly answering Palm’s prayers for a game changer. Sprint, the network hosting the Pre for now, was looking forward to the Pre’s release and the chance to show off its updated network and services, and that it can compete against carriers such as Verizon Wireless and AT&T. Calls to several New York area stores found the stores sold out of the Pre. Some service representatives said they expect more phones in today, while others said they didn’t know when new phones would arrive.

Discerning techies probably know of the the programming language occam, designed for the Inmos Transputer highly parallel processor from the 1980s. It's not so widely-known that occam is still around and available for the x86 in the form of the Kent Retargetable occam Compiler, KRoC - nor that there's an entire PC OS, complete with GUI, written in occam-pi: RMoX.