General Development Archive

From C To Assembly Language

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-24 General Development 28 Comments

LinuxGazette features interesting articles on their issues for August and September, including an article introducing the assembly language.

wxWindows 2.4.2 Released

Submitted by anonymous 2003-09-23 General Development 5 Comments

wxWindows 2.4.2 has been released. This is a bug fix release.

Start Here to Learn about Grid Computing

Submitted by Frank 2003-09-23 General Development 8 Comments

Grid computing represents a big step in the world of computing. The technology is still fairly nascent, but at the developerWorks Grid computing zone, they're publishing a steady stream of new articles, tutorials, resources, and tools. Many visitors interested in Grid computing are asking some very basic questions: What do we do with all of this stuff? Where do we start? How do the pieces fit together? What comes next? This page provides an overview for readers who want to learn about Grid computing but don't know where to start. It places the basics of Grid computing into their proper context and ties together relevant developerWorks articles, tutorials, and tips.

Linux Compilers and Assemblers

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-22 General Development 9 Comments

Rafeeq Rehman and Christopher Paul explain how to use compilers and assemblers productively in a development environment.

Code Editors Renew Approach to IDEs

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-21 General Development 43 Comments

Call it a back-to-basics movement or simply professionals seeking the best tools to get the job done well and on time. With enterprises putting a premium on productivity, a quiet revolution among programmers is eschewing the heavy, feature-filled IDE and turning instead to the venerable standby: the code editor. Developers seek more control over productivity with an old programming tool standby.

Agent Support in libferris 1.1.10

Guest post by Ben Martin 2003-09-19 General Development 3 Comments

There is now a plugin interface in libferris so that the filesystem can use AI to make suggestions as to what emblems a file should have. Currently I have Bayesian (bogofilter) and Support Vector Machine (svm_light) agents. The interface supports anything that can train on selected files and the attachment of emblems and then proffer a fuzzy assertion or retraction given an example file. The agent's beliefs are all collected and resolved to give an overall fuzzy assertion/retraction belief based on how trusted you think the agents are (the trust resolution should allow many resolution paths in the next release).

Documenting Source Code

Submitted by Frequent Reader 2003-09-17 General Development 46 Comments

Jef Raskin (former Apple developer) has written a critique of the current state of Integrated Development Environments. He notes that programmers have been struggling with the same problems for 30 years, and although new IDEs have simplified many tasks, many are still a usability nightmare, noting, "most current IDEs make adding comments difficult, sometimes painful: You often have to wrap comments by hand, discouraging paragraph-length explanations, or at least discouraging their editing. It is incredible to see antediluvian interfaces in 21st-century products."

Borland is Embracing wxWindows

Submitted by Sean Long 2003-09-17 General Development 42 Comments

According to this, Borland is using wxWindows as the C++ framework for their upcoming C++ BuilderX product. Borland will be committing changes back to the open source wxWindows project.

SciTech Software Announces Open Watcom 1.1

Submitted by Andrew Bloo 2003-09-16 General Development 13 Comments

SciTech Software, Inc. today announced that Open Watcom 1.1 has been released. This update includes a number of eagerly anticipated fixes and enhancements and can be downloaded, free of charge, from the Open Watcom web site.

Cocoa Tutorial Series: Loop the Loop

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-14 General Development 11 Comments

This is the fourth tutorial in series of learning Cocoa for MacOSX. Read the article at MacDevCenter.

Komodo Breathes New Fire into IDE

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-13 General Development 8 Comments

"The newly formed Komodo group's mandate was to provide deep support for various programming languages including Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, XSLT, as well as web standards like XML, HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. It seemed only natural to support programming on both the Windows and Linux platforms." Read the article at LinuxPlanet.

Real Programming with AWK

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-10 General Development 13 Comments

AWK may not be the first language that comes to mind when you need to write a program, but its flexibility may surprise you. The article is at LinuxJournal.

IBM’s JFS 1.1.3 Released

Eugenia Loli 2003-09-06 General Development 23 Comments

Dave Kleikamp announced the release of JFS 1.1.3 on the lkml yesterday. Anyone using JFS who recently upgraded to the 2.6-test Linux kernel will want to take note of the new version of the utilities.

Mix-and-Matching Software?

Submitted by Bolo 2003-09-05 General Development 9 Comments

SDTimes has an article about Transitive Technologies which claims to have a software-based binary translation package. The software, called QuickTransit, "decodes application binaries into an intermediate form, optimizes blocks of code and stores them in cache, then encodes for the target processor." There's nothing on the Transitive website, but there this page explaining (in very general terms) the software means for binary translation. Mix-and-match your software perhaps?

SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux 2.0 now Available

Submitted by AndrewB 2003-09-04 General Development 14 Comments

SciTech Software, Inc. today announced that it is has released SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux 2.0 – The Simple Driver Solution. This release is based on SciTech’s SNAP (System Neutral Access Protocol) architecture and targets the Linux enterprise markets with a host of features designed to reduce the total cost of ownership associated with maintaining Linux on corporate enterprises. Read more for the rest of the press release.

Metaclass programming in Python, Part 2

Submitted by Idean 2003-09-03 General Development 1 Comment

This article revisits the working of metaclasses and their relation to other OOP concepts. It contrasts class instantiation with inheritance, distinguishes classmethods and metamethods, and explains and solves metaclass conflicts.

Linux Format Reviews SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux

Submitted by Andrew Bloo 2003-09-02 General Development 41 Comments

"Whether X configuration is getting you down or you need a lightweight graphics solution for that embedded app, Richard Drummond thinks SciTech has the answer." LinuxFormat's complete review is posted at SciTech's web site in PDF format.

Ch 4.0 Released

Eugenia Loli 2003-08-28 General Development 13 Comments

Ch is a superset of C language. It parses and executes C code directly without intermediate code or byte code. It does not distinguish interpreted code from compiled C/C++ code. The new Ch 4.0 is the most complete C interpreter in existence and is embeddable in other programs and hardware.

Secure Programmer: Developing secure programs

David Adams 2003-08-27 General Development 13 Comments

This column explains how to write secure applications; it focuses on the Linux operating system, but many of the principles apply to any system. In today's networked world, software developers must know how to write secure programs, yet this information isn't widely known or taught. This first installment of the Secure programmer column introduces the basic ideas of how to write secure applications and discusses how to identify the security requirements for your specific application. Future installments will focus on different common vulnerabilities and how to prevent them.

SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux – 2.0-RC1 Released

Submitted by andrewb 2003-08-26 General Development 66 Comments

SciTech SNAP Graphics for Linux is a simple to use, easy to configure alternative to XFree86 Graphics Drivers. This latest release supports 125 graphics cards on multiple Linux distributions with full 2D acceleration and adds support for the latest hardware from ATI.