General Development Archive

The newest version of the popular RPM package manager is now out with improved performance and functionality. But there's a bit of a catch with RPM version 5.0. Linux vendor Red Hat officially considers RPM 5.0 a project fork. "RPM5 is a fork of RPM, and is not related to RPM.org," Daniel Riek, Product Manager Red Hat Enterprise Linux told InternetNews.com. "Neither Red Hat or Fedora are involved in RPM5, and have no current plans to use it. Red Hat remains committed to the main RPM.org releases and development."

Measure the total time of entry and verify the time between keystrokes to help authenticate a user regardless of the data being entered. Learn how to apply the open source tools xev and Perl in keystroke dynamics to measure the more-subtle characteristics of human-computer interaction. This article uses example code to demonstrate keystroke dynamics for enhancing the security of your applications in authentication and continuous data entry contexts.

Valgrind is a tool that helps you find memory management problems in Linux programs. From the 3.3.0 log: Helgrind works again with improved race detection and better error messages. Massif generates better output. Cachegrind has been extended to do branch-misprediction profiling. Both conditional and indirect branches are profiled. Scalability has been improved for very large programs, particularly those with a million or more malloc'd blocks in use at once. These improvements mostly affect Memcheck, which is also up to 10% faster for all programs, with x86 Linux seeing the largest improvement. The documentation has been reorganized. Experimental tools have been added, and more.

"Today the Perl Foundation announces the release of Perl 5.10, the first major upgrade to the wildly popular dynamic programming language in over five years. This latest version builds on the successful 5.8.x series by adding powerful new language features and improving the Perl interpreter itself. The Perl development team, called the the Perl Porters, have taken features and inspiration from the ambitious Perl 6 project, as well as from chiefly academic languages and blended them with Perl's pragmatic view to practicality and usefulness."

Symbian's introductory training covers Active Objects. Active Objects are a Symbian specific method of providing co-operative multitasking. During the introduction to Active Objects we are all told about how inefficient and bloated multi threaded applications can be. Each thread requires heap and stack space, it requires kernel resources to provide for the context switching, and time slicing. All of this is an overhead on a device with limited resources. Instead Symbian provide Active Objects. We can have many Active Objects within a single process all waiting on different events. This means that we do not need as many threads, and hence we consume less resources. More here.

Lazy programming is a general concept of delaying the processing of a function or request until the results are needed. Thinking in terms of lazy programming can help you rid your code of unneeded computation and restructure programs to be more problem-oriented.

Ruby on Rails 2.0 has been released. "Rails 2.0 is finally finished after about a year in the making. This is a fantastic release that’s absolutely stuffed with great new features, loads of fixes, and an incredible amount of polish. We’ve even taken a fair bit of cruft out to make the whole package more coherent and lean." On Zenbits, they give tips on how to install 2.0.

NetBeans 6.0 has been released. The 6.0 release includes significant enhancements and new features, including a completely rewritten editor infrastructure, support for additional languages, new productivity features, and a simplified installation process that allows you to easily install and configure the IDE to meet your exact needs.

ES is a fairly interesting looking open source research OS created by Nintendo. Runs natively on x86 (and qemu of course), kernel is written in C++, uses an ECMAScript interpreter for all of the userland, uses Cairo for graphics, and even has a port of Squeak.

Delve into some of the compiler options used to build Visual C++ projects and the UNIX and g++ equivalents, take a closer look at the g++ attribute mechanism as it relates to porting, and examines some common problems you might encounter while porting from a 32-bit Windows environment to a 64-bit UNIX environment.

Lisp is an excellent programming language that allows you to expand your knowledge of programming languages due to its largely typeless nature. Find out how to develop Lisp applications using the Cusp Eclipse plug-in. It can also help those seasoned in the Java language, PHP, or C/C++ think in new ways when developing applications.

Are the C programming language and its object-oriented offspring - C++, C#, Objective-C - still well-suited to the requirements of multithreaded, network-oriented computing environments today? That's the question on the minds of engineers at Microsoft Research, whose latest programming language is today being officially moved off the back burner. The F# language has received the company's official blessing.

"Ulrich Drepper recently approached us asking if we would be interested in publishing a lengthy document he had written on how memory and software interact. Memory usage is often the determining factor in how software performs, but good information on how to avoid memory bottlenecks is hard to find. This article is the first in a serie of articles (the original has over 100 pages) that will get published on LWN weekly. Once the entire series is out, Ulrich will be releasing the full text."

The LLVM Project recently released a new version of their compiler, optimizer and code generators. LLVM includes a drop-in GCC-compatible C/C++ and ObjC compiler, mature optimization technology (including cross file/whole program optimization), and a highly optimizing code generator. For people who enjoy hacking on compilers and runtimes, LLVM provides libraries for implementing custom optimizers and code generators including JIT compiler support. This release is the first to provide beta GCC 4.2 compatibility as well as the new "clang" C/ObjC front-end, which provides capabilities to build source-to-source translators and many other tools.