General Development Archive

The video proceedings of the 2009 FastOS workshop are being made available as a video podcast rss feed (also available for subscription directly from the iTunes store). The first three talks are now available with new talks being posted every week. The complete schedule of talks along with the slides which were presented are available here. FastOS is a Department of Energy/Office of Science funded program focused on exploratory work in operating systems and runtimes for petascale and beyond supercomputers.

It's that time of year again-- the time for the latest and greatest Crossover release for both Mac and Linux platforms. Version 8.0 brings new and updated support for many applications, especially Quicken 2009, Microsoft Office 2007, and Internet Explorer 7 (why Linux or Mac users would want IE7 is beyond me, but to each his own). Also, the Wine project has, of course, benefited more from Crossover's advancements.

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.

I recently started using Git for my local revision control. Since I spend about 90% of my coding time inside the Vim editor, I went looking for a plugin that would make Vim play nice with Git. In this article I present two different vim plugins and explore their feature-set via screenshots.

Learn how to better integrate scripts with command-line tools. Examine using shell_exec(), exec(), passthru(), and system(); safely passing information to the command line; and safely retrieving information from it. See how to integrate closely with underlying shell commands and folding any return values into your interfaces and processes.

Microsoft has come one step closer to delivering a parallel programming language to developers. On May 8, Microsoft made Axum, the company's foray into parallel programming, available on its MSDN DevLabs portal. Axum is a .NET language for building parallel applications. According to a Microsoft description, Axum "is a language that builds upon the architecture of the Web and principles of isolation, actors and message-passing to increase application safety, responsiveness, scalability and developer productivity."

Vimscript is a mechanism for reshaping and extending the Vim editor. Scripting allows you to create new tools, simplify common tasks, and even redesign and replace existing editor features. This article introduces the fundamental components of the Vimscript programming language: values, variables, expressions, statements, functions, and commands. These features are demonstrated and explained through a series of simple examples.

GCC 4.4.0 has been released. There are many interesting changes, including the merge of the Graphite branch, which is "a new framework for loop optimizations based on a polyhedral intermediate representation", improved support of the upcoming C++0x standard, and a new register allocator.

The rsync utility is a mandatory tool for your command-line work, and you need to learn how to use it for easy, safe, quick laptop-desktop synchronization. This article introduces rsync and mentions several related tools, all of which provide easy synchronization procedures.

Learn how to use configurable JavaServer Pages TagLib-based controls that leverage JavaScript Serialized Object Notation, JavaScript scripting language, and Cascading Style Sheets. Because they are standard JSP TagLib controls, find out how you can easily drop them into any Java EE application to provide more intuitive and responsive user user interfaces.

Recently, a new browser war has erupted all over the internet, with various browsers making massive improvements in each release to trumpet those made by others. While Firefox certainly ignited this new browser war, Chrome is the one who started the JavaScript war. The first release of Google's web browser came with a brand new JavaScript engine that was a lot faster than those of its competitors, forcing them to improve their JavaScript performance as well. This whole JS thing has gotten to the heads of the folks at Google, and they've created a site for experiments which show off the power of JS.

If you don't want to commit to the idiosyncrasies of a specific shell running on a particular platform, try the Squirrel Shell. The Squirrel Shell provides an advanced, object-oriented scripting language that works equally well on UNIX, Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows systems. Write a script once, and run it anywhere.

Jeremy White posted the CodeWeavers' Outlook for 2009, explaining what the group has been working fervently on the past eight months as well as plans for the coming months of 2009. CodeWeavers develops and sells CrossOver, an application based upon Wine that can run Windows applications on Mac OS X and Linux, specifically certain games and office applications. They're also the leading corporate backer of the Wine Project. In the road map, White explains that the past eight months have been spent on unattractive, under-the-hood improvements to Wine, particularly "things like .NET support, work on a DIB Engine, Gdiplus, and a lot of Direct X work. We've also spent a lot of energy focusing on issues with Microsoft Office 2003 and 2007, in an effort to bring those applications fully up to 'Gold' level." He goes on to say that DirectX 9 support is coming along nicely for the CrossOver Games project, and DirectX 10 is around the corner. The plans for the upcoming months include shipping CrossOver 8.0 for both Linux and Mac, which will include many improvements, the juiciest of which are centered around Photoshop CS3, Microsoft Office, and Quicken 2009. Aside from adding more and better application support in Wine, the GUI of CrossOver is supposed to get a hefty overhaul by the CodeWeavers team.

"We speak to Steve Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell, or sh. In the early 1970s Bourne was at the Computer Laboratory in Cambridge, England working on a compiler for ALGOL68 as part of his PhD work in dynamical astronomy. This work paved the way for him to travel to IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in New York in 1973, in part to undertake research into compilers. Through this work, and a series of connections and circumstance, Bourne got to know people at Bell Labs who then offered him a job in the Unix group in 1975. It was during this time Bourne developed sh."