General Development Archive

When you spend a lot of time looking at different Linux distributions you get used to reading the phrase, "... is a general purpose operating system with a focus toward..." Sometimes it's a focus toward ease of use, sometimes it's a focus toward improved package management, other times it's security. There are a lot of general purpose Linux distributions out there, which is good, but one thing I love about Linux is its ability to fill a niche. For instance, it would be difficult for me to get through a work week without having tools such as GParted Live, for partition management; Knoppix, for hardware detection; and Clonezilla, for saving and restoring disk images. This past week I had a chance to talk with Steven Shiau, one of the developers behind Clonezilla.

"With chip makers continuing to increase the number of cores they include on each new generation of their processors, perhaps it's time to rethink the basic architecture of today's operating systems, suggested Dave Probert, a kernel architect within the Windows core operating systems division at Microsoft."

Brown University has developed an IDE for Java called Code Bubbles that takes a pretty radical departure from current IDEs. While most IDEs, such as Eclipse are file-based, Code Bubbles is based on fragments. The system appears to support reading and editing code with fragments, multi-tasking, annotating and sharing, and debugging with bubbles. There's a website with video too.

So have you actually read the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement? The EFF, using a freedom of information act to shrewdly get a copy legally off of NASA, look into the details and don't like what they find. As well as trying to prevent anybody from so much as mentioning the existence of these terms, Apple owe you no more than $50 if they sink your company by removing your apps for any reason they so please. It makes for scary reading, that is--if you think the terms are enforceable in court. I hope to see this very thing challenged as soon as possible.

Less than four months after its unveiling at an early, experimental stage, Google Go looks promising to developers who say it offers significant improvements over other programming languages.

Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister writes about the no-win scenario facing today's independent programmers: "In a knowledge economy, programmers rank among our most valuable workers, yet the current legal and regulatory climate makes a career as an independent software developer virtually a dead-end prospect." Section 1706 of the 1986 Tax Reform Act, the hurdles and costs of obtaining health care for one's own family, a hostile legal climate in search of accountability for any defects in code - these harsh realities make it "easy to see why software developers would give up on entrepreneurship. For many, the risks simply don't match the potential rewards. Better to keep their heads down, not rock the boat, and hope they can hang onto their jobs until retirement."

IPfaces is a client-server framework for iPhone (and presumably other platforms soon) that enables developers to create a server-side app using their familiar tools then connect to a generic client that's already downloadable in the App Store. It's dual license, with a GPL Open Source version for free projects and a commercial version for for-profit apps. Unlike other frameworks that allow you to create an iPhone app using non Objective-C tools, this one gives you a real client, not just a wrapper for a web app.

"Today, Clang completed its first complete self-host! We built all of LLVM and Clang with Clang (over 550k lines of C++ code). The resulting binaries passed all of Clang and LLVM's regression test suites, and the Clang-built Clang could then build all of LLVM and Clang again. The third-stage Clang was also fully-functional, completing the bootstrap."

"Computer users with rudimentary skills will be able to program via screen shots rather than lines of code with a new graphical scripting language called Sikuli that was devised at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With a basic understanding of Python, people can write programs that incorporate screen shots of graphical user interface elements to automate computer work."

Over at the osdev.org forums, they're hosting a brand new Bootsector Competition. Entries are limited to 512 bytes, and must be able to work with both FAT12 and FAT16 file systems. Each entry must be capable of locating a 32-bit ELF file in the filesystem, parsing the ELF headers, and executing the ELF binary. All entries are ISC licensed, and two prizes (in the form of Amazon.com gift certificates or donations to the PDPC/Freenode) are at stake, in addition to bragging rights. For the full contest rules, and how to enter, check out the forum post.

Here's something you probably don't know, but really should - especially if you're a programmer, and especially especially if you're using Intel's compiler. It's a fact that's not widely known, but Intel's compiler deliberately and knowingly cripples performance for non-Intel (AMD/VIA) processors.

Even though I'm not a programmer, I still know that while some programmers like the idea of graphical programming, whereas others shun the concept completely, opting for a more hands-on approach. While Microsoft is quite active in the field of graphical programming, the company's own high-level coders aren't very keen on the idea.

Some of the kids over at Georgia Tech have recently unveiled a development that takes realtime information from varied sources such as CCTV cameras and motion detectors and layers it on to Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth. The result? The ability to watch things happen as they happen anywhere in the world (well-- not quite anywhere just yet, but that's the idea). While this undoubtedly reeks of "awesome," the mind of a suspicious citizen of the 21st century automatically jumps to a future Orwellian land of Big Brothers who are this time running professional versions of Google Earth in dark offices atop mile-high, tinted-window skyscrapers.

Cisco recently announced the finalists in its "Think Inside the Box" Developer Contest. The contest is intended to "promote the concept of the network as a platform" and it's based on the capabilities of the Cisco Integrated Services Router Application Extension Platform (AXP), which is essentially a Linux blade that plugs into the Cisco Integrated Services Router. Teams from all over the world entered the contest, and seemed to really run with the idea of offloading tasks to the network hardware. Read on for our interview with one of the contest's finalists.