C99 - almost a decade later

So I know it takes a few years for standards to get into implementation, but there sure isn't much buzz about C99 these days.

The stdint.h and stdbool.h headers are great. why aren't they more prevalent?

C99 Overview

trying to crack the multicore nut

Glad to see there's lots of new APIs out there to take advantage of all these extra processing cores we all have sitting idle in our machines.

RAPIDMIND : Product Overview

These guys even give you a free trial through IBM's virtual loaner program.

"Why program by hand in five days what you can spend five years of your life automating?"

Terence Parr's, creator of the ANTLR parser generator, motto.

I love that he goes on to say in his book:
"Building tools can also be much more fun than your real job."

exported display over ssh

It took me a couple tries to get this right.
Make sure SSH to remote machine is working.

On remote machine:
make sure

cat /etc/ssh/sshd_config | grep X11Forwarding

returns

X11Forwarding yes

On terminal computer start a cygwin shell:

export DISPLAY=localhost:0.0
startx &
ssh -Y hostname


From there xterm& should work like a charm

C Style (cont)

I found the modular C style reference I was looking for:
Chapter 6 of McConnel's Code Complete

Here's a great page cataloging many other C Styles, and an interesting paper: "#ifdef considered harmful"

C and C Style Guides

super computing for $240

How much money would it take to put together a 100 node linux cluster? Then once you've built it are you using it at 100% capacity?

What if you could use it for just the hours you're flying it and spend $240? That's how a geek at the New York Times used Amazons S3/EC2 services to solve a big time problem: generating PDFs of scanned images for all New York times public domain articles from 1851-1922.

Linkage

EDA buy up

Seems like Cadence and Synopsys are buying every little fish they can get their jaws around.

From Synopsys' point of view it looks like $227M is a good price for a company that posted net income of $3M in 2006, followed by $13M in 2007 with only a %14 increase in revenue. It must be more than the money...or at least the money in these little factoids.

EETimes.com - Synopsys to pay $227M for Synplicity

Apple: doing it wrong but getting it right

Interesting article that talks about Apple's Chief Asshole Steve Jobs, their iron veil of secrecy and their alone-in-the-tech-industry vertical integration .

I'm of the Servant Leadership school of thought, and it's disheartening to see that the "Beat the dog every once in a while and he'll spend all his time trying to please you" school of thought actually works.

linkage

$30 ARM7 mini-kit

TI MSP430 and Silicon Labs have low cost tool-stick style boards, but this is the first ARM7 based one I've seen, and it's only $30!

Digikey linkage

C style

I've been looking for a standard reference for C++ style C, but all I can find are old C style manuals like the venerable Indian Hill guide with its famous (and outdated) admonishment against headers including other headers.

This embedded C++ style guide makes some good points (like no #ifdefs)

F22 International Dateline Bug

Six $125M airplanes almost crash because someone forgot that airplanes will sometimes cross the international dateline.

DailyTech - Lockheed's F-22 Raptor Gets Zapped by International Date Line

libcli

Looks like a good piece of code. I don't imagine it's written for a space constrained embedded system, but it's got to have a nicer programmers interface than the RedBoot command line parser

SourceForge.net: User's Guide

svn autoprops

I was looking for my standard TortoiseSvn autoprops file and couldn't find it. So for future reference here it is:


Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Tigris.org]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Tigris.org\Subversion]


[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Tigris.org\Subversion\Config]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Tigris.org\Subversion\Config\auto-props]
"*.doc"="svn:mime-type=application/msword"
"*.xls"="svn:mime-type=application/msexcel"
"*.ppt"="svn:mime-type=application/mspowerpoint"
"*.pdf"="svn:mime-type=application/pdf"
"*.png"="svn:mime-type=image/png"
"*.jpg"="svn:mime-type=image/jpeg"
"*.m"="svn:keywords=ID URL LastChangedRevision LastChangedBy"
"*.c"="svn:keywords=ID URL LastChangedRevision LastChangedBy"
"*.h"="svn:keywords=ID URL LastChangedRevision LastChangedBy"
"*.cpp"="svn:keywords=ID URL LastChangedRevision LastChangedBy"
"*.hpp"="svn:keywords=ID URL LastChangedRevision LastChangedBy"
"*.A51"="svn:keywords=ID URL LastChangedRevision LastChangedBy"
"*.pro"="svn:keywords=ID URL LastChangedRevision LastChangedBy"
"Makefile"="svn:keywords=ID URL LastChangedRevision LastChangedBy"
"Makefile.*"="svn:keywords=ID URL LastChangedRevision LastChangedBy"


[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Tigris.org\Subversion\Config\Miscellany]
"enable-auto-props"="yes"