General Development Archive

Writing Multithreaded GUI Applications with Python

Eugenia Loli 2003-02-03 General Development 8 Comments

Want to take advantage of multithreading and side-step its associated obstacles? Boudewijn Rempt uses the PyQt toolkit to help you work around the challenges of programming a multithreaded GUI in Python .

Software Strategies for Emerging Developers

Submitted by Jay 2003-01-30 General Development 28 Comments

"Software is big business. Every year, consumers spend over a hundred billion dollars purchasing shrink-wrap software. For you as a developer, shareware is a cheap, effective means of marketing and distributing your software. Shareware lets the public redistribute your software for free, then pay a registration fee if they like it. Today, nearly all software companies provide some form of free trial version of their software." Read the article at MacDevCenter.

Bochs 2.0.2 Released

Eugenia Loli 2003-01-25 General Development 8 Comments

The bug fix version Bochs 2.0.2 has been released. This release is the last planned bugfix release for the 2.0.x series. On other dev news, multiplatform GUI toolkit wxWindows 2.4.0 was recently released.

Cross-Platform Packaging Facility OpenPKG 1.2 Released

Submitted by Ralf S. Engelschall 2003-01-24 General Development 7 Comments

The OpenPKG project released version 1.2 of their unique RPM-based cross-platform Unix software packaging facility. OpenPKG 1.2 provides 361 selected packages which include proven versions of popular Unix software -- all carefully packaged for easy deployment on the six officially supported Unix platforms FreeBSD 4.7 and 5.0, Debian GNU/Linux 2.2 and 3.0, and Sun Solaris 8 and 9.

Excuse Me While I Reboot My Dishwasher

David Adams 2003-01-21 General Development 72 Comments

An article in Baseline covers the increasing reliance that everyday appliances have on complex software, and the potentially disastrous results when that software fails. One prominent example of this is the BMW 745i, which has a sort of uber-control joystick that controls a WindowsCE-based system. This system was so buggy that BMW has done two recalls. The software was too ambitious and too poorly tested, so things like the brake lights not working and the units suddenly changing to metric are the result.

Where Old Software Goes to Die

Eugenia Loli 2003-01-17 General Development 24 Comments

"When old programmers like me (I'm 41) get together we talk about the applications from the old days. What happens to these beauties?" Read the editorial at ZDNews.

Why Automatic Information Management is Doomed to Fail

Submitted by Jared White 2003-01-14 General Development 8 Comments

There has been a growing movement in the computer industry as of late towards exploration of more database-like filesystem paradigms - the reason being that today's filesystems are primitive, scattered, and cannot efficiently manage the immense amount of information that computer users have to work with on a regular basis every day.

Programming Languages Will Become OSes (But Are Not Quite Yet)

Guest post by Steven Haryanto 2003-01-13 General Development 29 Comments

A couple of months ago, at the Lightweight Languages Workshop 2002, Matthew Flat made a premise in his talk: Operating system and programming language are the same thing (at least "mathematically speaking"). I find this interesting and has a lot of truth in it. Both OS and PL are platforms on which other programs run. Both are virtualizing machines. Both make it easier for people to write applications (by providing API, abtractions, frameworks, etc.)

What’s New in Visual Studio .NET 2003

Eugenia Loli 2003-01-13 General Development 20 Comments

"Visual Studio .NET 2003 just came out as a "final beta." I’ve been developing on it for a while now, and I want to point out some of the signature features and tools in this product.2 Read the article at 3Leaf.com.

GCC to Get New C++ parser and Precompiled Header Support

Submitted by Garen 2003-01-13 General Development 12 Comments

The GCC Project has just updated its front page with the addition of two significant announcements: support for precompiled headers (PCH) and a new C++ parser that has brought g++ near the top of the food chain in conformance and led to over 100 bugs being closed.

Advanced Linux file Systems are Bigger, Faster, and More Reliable

Eugenia Loli 2003-01-06 General Development 10 Comments

"The file system is one of the most important parts of an operating system. The file system stores and manages user data on disk drives, and ensures that what's read from storage is identical to what was originally written. In addition to storing user data in files, the file system also creates and manages information about files and about itself." Read the long article by JFS' own Steve Best.

Inside the World of Extreme Programming

2003-01-06 General Development 3 Comments

"XP works best for medium-sized teams where a product can be delivered in stages, and where there's freedom to experiment with some of the more controversial techniques," author Ron Jeffries said.

Context Switching, Part 2

Guest post by OSNews Writer 2003-01-05 General Development 14 Comments

This article looks at two behaviors of the scheduler. The first behavior is the reaction to adding more choices to the scheduler's switching decision. The second demonstrates fairness by performing a uniform workload in multiple threads. Source code is provided so you can experiment. Last month's column looked at bare context switch times by using the best primitives on both Windows and Linux. According to those results, context switch time under Windows takes only half as long as under Linux.

Open Source Software Review 2002

Submitted by Prognathous 2003-01-01 General Development 2 Comments

Network Computing Asia published a recap of open source software's progress in 2002, and includes discussion of Linux, Apache, OpenOffice, UnitedLinux, Ogg Vorbis, Lindows.com, Sun, advances in storage options for Linux, and Linux on the desktop.

Open Source Year in Review

David Adams 2002-12-31 General Development 36 Comments

News.com has published a 2002 in Review piece on the open source segment of the technology industry. Open source had a very good year in 2002, even as (or perhaps because) the rest of the industry suffered financially. Linux made strides in adoption at large companies and saw some major improvements in power and usability, Open Office became usable, Microsoft started to get scared, and Sun finally succumbed to "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." Most of all, even though scores of small companies went out of business as venture funding from the last millennium finally ran out, Open Source software is still around, and flourishing.

FOSDEM Conference Feb 8-9, Brussels, Belgium

David Adams 2002-12-18 General Development 4 Comments

FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' Meeting is coming soon, and in preparation, the organizers have published interviews with some of the participants: David Faure for KDE and Michael Meeks for GNOME.

Why Linux Binaries are not as Easy to Handle?

Guest post by Juan Linietsky 2002-12-16 General Development 127 Comments

Have you ever wondered why in other Operating Systems such as Windows, MacOS or even BeOS installing software is so easy compared to Linux? In such OSes you can simply download and decompress a file or run an installer process which will easily walk you through the process.

Get a Taste of Bochs 2.0

Eugenia Loli 2002-12-04 General Development 23 Comments

Bochs, the x86 emulator, will celebrate its version 2.0 soon. Changes include: CPU optimizations boost simulation speed by around 2x, Bochs now supports up to 8 hard drives, or 8 CDROMs, or any combination, added support for the AMD x86-64 instruction set used in their Hammer processor, added support for MMX instructions, added support for SSE and SSE2 instructions, remote GDB stub support.

Programming Bits: C# Data Types

Eugenia Loli 2002-12-04 General Development 1 Comment

"In my previous article, I introduced the C# programming language and explained how it works in the context of the Mono environment, an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .NET framework. I will now go on to some details on the data types supported by the C# programming language." Read the second article at LinuxGazette. Another development article ("Writing Portable Code") is here.

Visual Studio .Net Enters Final Beta Phase

Eugenia Loli 2002-11-26 General Development 3 Comments

Microsoft Corp. last week announced the final beta of its Visual Studio .Net 2003 product -formerly known by the code name Everett- and released its .Net Compact Framework. New features include: Availability of .Net Compact Framework, Improved scalability with support for up to 32 processors, Improved performance, Support for new Web services specifications: WS-Security, WS-Routing and WS-Attachments, 98 percent conformance with the International Organization for Standardization's C++ standard, Integration of Visual J#.