General Development Archive

A fast, free distributed method for C/C++ compilation

Given the nature of open source software, many Linux applications are distributed in a "tarball" containing source code that you must build before you can run the application. Larger applications can take several hours to build. This article shows how you can use the distributed C compiler, distcc, to speed up the compilation of these sources so you can start using them sooner.

Eclipse 3.0 Final Released

Today the Eclipse Foundation announced the availability of the royalty-free 3.0 release of the Eclipse Platform, adding enhancements that improve flexibility, scalability, interoperability and responsiveness. Eclipse is an award-winning universal platform for tools integration, software modeling and testing that has been broadly adopted by commercial vendors, academic institutions and open technology developers. With release 3.0, Eclipse now extends its sophisticated object-oriented development technologies to support a rich-client platform (RCP) that enables construction of desktop applications.

Weave a neural net with Python

Neural nets, also known as artificial neural networks, mathematically model bioelectrical networks in the brain. Massively parallel and more inductive than deductive, they are used for everything from voice and character recognition to artificial intelligence. Python developer Andrew Blais introduces you to the simplest of the neural nets, the Hopfield -- and his net.py application gives you a hands-on opportunity to explore its ability to reconstruct distorted patterns.

A Directory Monitor Class For Delphi

There are times when a directory needs watched.  For reasons of its own, a program may need to know when a file is deleted, updated or renamed.  If .NET is involved, this is a trivial task.  Create an instance of the FileSystemWatcher; set some properties, and the task is completed.  If a non .NET solution is required (and regardless of the hype, some people haven’t embraced .NET in all of its glory.), the ReadDirectoryChangesW function must be used, however the documentation for ReadDirectoryChangesW is sketchy at best.

The Case for Gconf

There has been a lot of commentary recently about Gnome, and a common source of confusion seems to be Gconf - what is it, how does it work, and so on. Some people even seem to confuse Gconf with the registry database in Windows. I will attempt to clear some of this confusion and give an overview of Gconf, and why it looks the way it does.

Subversion 1.0.5 Released

Versions up to and including 1.0.4 have a potential denial of service and heap overflow issue related to the parsing of strings in the 'svn://' family of access protocols. This affects only sites running svnserve. It does not affect 'http://' access; repositories served only by Apache/mod_dav_svn do not have this vulnerability. This release fixes this issue.