Programming

Printf Debugging Revisited 59

Posted by timothy from the visit-nicely-now dept.
gsasha writes "After long nights spent in debugging, w e have developed a C++ logging facility geared for debugging - and an article that describes our debugging methodology. The article consists of two parts: the first one describes the basics of the method, and the second one presents advanced techniques (to be completed if there is enough reader interest).
Happy debugging!"
Programming

Programming Language Popularity Survey 68

Posted by timothy from the logo-also-loses dept.
An anonymous reader writes "David N. Welton yesterday posted a study of the Programming Language Popularity. Is SQL your fave, or perhaps you're interested in the 'Click Price of PHP' or 'Craig's List Jobs'? Needless to say, my favorite languages (Prolog and Common Lisp) did not so much as register on the survey."
Mozilla

FTP Client For Firefox 76

Posted by timothy from the where-does-the-movie-tie-in dept.
cuv writes "As Firefox becomes more and more popular, programmers are becoming savvy to Mozilla's excellent development platform. I happen to be one of those and I would like to share the FTP client that I've designed for Firefox. Give it a try, report any bugs, and if you haven't already: switch over to Firefox! Better yet: start developing!"
Programming

Interview with Tom Lord of Arch Revision System 334

Posted by michael from the call-him-lord dept.
comforteagle writes "Every revision control system has its supporters and detractors, but none is as polar as Arch. Either you hate it or think it is the best thing in revision control ever. Built more around what our beloved kernel hackers use (BK), Arch is definitely a departure from CVS and Subversion. I've interviewed Tom Lord, Arch's daddy, about the application, and he has some -ahem- interesting answers and opinions."
Operating Systems

Source Code for CTSS released 177

Posted by CmdrTaco from the but-what-will-run-it dept.
Mainframes ROCK! writes "The source code for the Compatible Time-Sharing System, CTSS, has been released, and the here is the source code. CTSS was one of the first time-sharing operating systems and a direct ancestor of Linux. Developed at MIT in the 1960's on a specially modified IBM 7094 system.; it was developed at Project MAC at MIT. CTSS was first published, as well as operated in a time-sharing environment, in 1961; in addition, it was the system with the first computerized text formatting utility, and one of the very first to have inter-user electronic mail."
Communications

Asterisk Open Source PBX 1.0 Release 208

Posted by michael from the linux-phone-home dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Today at Astricon (the first Asterisk conference), Mark Spencer announced the release of version 1.0.0 of Asterisk. For those of you that don't know: Asterisk is a complete PBX in software. It runs on Linux and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX and more. Asterisk does voice over IP in three protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware. Asterisk users can be up and running, making phone calls in under an hour using the various guides found at the VoIP Wiki. Connectivity to the PSTN is provided by companies like VoicePulse, Nufone, Gafachi and VoipJet."
Mozilla

Interview with Camino Developer Mike Pinkerton 116

Posted by michael from the anything-but-ie dept.
An anonymous reader writes "As someone who has used Camino for much of the time since the OS X-centric Gecko browser was released, I've been hoping to see it hit version 1.0 (it's at 0.8 now). ArsTechnica has an interview with Mike Pinkerton, the lead developer for Camino in which he talks about the history and future of Camino along with his thoughts on Safari and Firefox."
Spam

DSPAM v3.2 Beta-1 Released 20

Posted by michael from the spam-all-you-want dept.
Nuclear Elephant writes "After three months of development, the first public beta of DSPAM v3.2 has been released for testing. New features include SQLite support, A Win32 build supplement, extensions API, and some advanced new processing functionality such as Bill Yerazunis' (CRM114) Sparse Binary Polynomial Hashing and v1.2 of the author's Bayesian Noise Reduction Logic. Accuracy in 3.x has reportedly peaked as high as 99.991% (2 errors in 22,786 messages). Grab the new copy and participate in the request for feedback."
Spam

IETF's MARID Is Dead 11

Posted by timothy from the that's-a-shame dept.
Daniel Goldman writes "According to this post, from Ted Hardie Co-Area Director for Applications, the IETF will be closing the MARID Working Group. This working group planned to develop a DNS-based mechanism for storing and distributing information associated with MTA authorization to prevent spam. It was chartered after extensive discussion of the issues in the IRTF's Anti-spam Research Group."
KDE

KDE 3.3 UI, Evaluated By 7 Real Users 141

Posted by timothy from the and-those-are-the-important-kind dept.
sgtrock writes "UserInstinct has an article that documents the reactions to KDE 3.3 by 7 users with limited or no Linux background. By and large, they found KDE intrguing, but far too busy. They all complained about some pretty basic UI issues; no stars echoed while the password was typed, anti-aliased fonts off by default, far too many options shown by default, etc. Most had minor UI issues as well; some of which were KDE specific, others that weren't. All in all, I would have to regard this test KDE 3.3's UI as somewhat disappointing. Especially since KDE strives so hard to provide a consistent and easy to use UI. IMO the single biggest issue is probably the overwhelming number of options that are exposed to a first-time user. Personally, I'm a guy who likes to tweak almost everything on a UI, so I love the way that KDE works. However, I have seen myself just how quickly beginners get turned off by the very busy option screens. There must be a better way of showing a sane number of options while still allowing power users to access the more esoteric ones. Anyone have any thoughts?"
Graphics

Metaprogramming GPUs with Sh 139

Posted by timothy from the at-least-it's-not-obscure dept.
Martin Ecker writes "With the advent of powerful, programmable GPUs in consumer graphics hardware, an increasing number of shading languages to program these GPUs has become available. One quite interesting language that - in many ways - has a very different approach than other mainstream shading languages (such as Cg or the OpenGL Shading Language) is Sh. The recently released book "Metaprogramming GPUs with Sh" by Michael McCool and Stefanus Du Toit, both major contributors to the Sh project, explains the basics of the Sh high-level shading language and the corresponding API and also goes into some of the details of the implementation. The book is intended for an audience that is already familiar with traditional shader development for programmable GPUs. Also, a firm background in 3D graphics programming and C++ is a must for the interested reader." Read on for the rest.
Programming

Statistical Programming With R 52

Posted by timothy from the no-r-in-statistics dept.
An anonymous reader writes "This series introduces you to R, a rich statistical environment, released as free software. It includes a programming language, an interactive shell, and extensive graphing capability. What's more, R comes with a spectacular collection of functions for mathematical and statistical manipulations -- with still more capabilities available in optional packages."
Programming

ALICE Wins Loebner 2004 Prize 2004 53

Posted by timothy from the not-quite-turing-approved dept.
alicebotmaster writes "The A.L.I.C.E. chatbot won the 2004 Loebner Prize contest for most human computer. The contest, held on September 19 in New York City, is based on the Turing Test for artificial intelligence. The non-profit ALICE A. I. Foundation was awarded the Bronze Loebner medal and a cash prize of $2000. The A.L.I.C.E. program runs on open source GNU licensed AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language) software. This was the third Loebner prize win for the ALICE and AIML software"
Programming

ICFP 2004 Programming Contest Results 30

Posted by timothy from the smaller-bikinis dept.
jnagra writes "The results of the 2004 ICFP Programming Contest have been announced. First place is to a program in Haskell, second place is to a program in C++, and the judges' prize is to a program in OCaml. The ICFP contest is an annual contest to promote functional languages (although programs in any language are accepted) and bestows on the winners unlimited bragging rights."
Windows

Microsoft Releases A New Monad Command Shell Beta 126

Posted by timothy from the sneer-or-consider dept.
Watercooler Warrior writes "Slashdot originally broke the news that a new Microsoft command shell was in the works when a reader noticed a suspicious job posting by Microsoft India. Today Microsoft released the first really usable version of the shell (codenamed Monad) to beta testers - and anyone who carefully reads the WinHEC slides about Monad will find how to join the beta and get a peek at it. The shell looks like a bunch of old-school Unix and Perl hackers were given free rein to do what they wanted with the .NET framework, and from what is known about the backgrounds of the Monad developers this is probably pretty close to the truth."
Java

Numerical Computing in Java? 196

Posted by Cliff from the calculating-coffee dept.
Nightshade queries: "I work for a department in a big financial company that uses equal amounts of C++ and Java. For a variety of reasons, we've decided that Java is the future of the group because of all the benefits of the language (it's so easy to use compared to C++, we can use Eclipse, Ant, jUnit, etc). The problem is that we do a lot of numerical computing and Java has no operator overloading! Languages like C# have operator overloading and because of this company's like CenterSpace have popped up with some nice looking numerical libraries. Try to find numerical packages for Java and it'll be pretty tough. What have people done in terms of numerical computing in Java? We currently use the Jama and Colt libraries for matrices and complex numbers, but these have awkward interfaces without operator overloading and are incomplete (no support for things like symmetric matrices) so we're looking for better solutions. So should we bite the bullet and switch to C#? Should we use a pre-processor like JFront? What have other people done?"
Programming

Comparing Linux C and C++ Compilers 379

Posted by michael from the consumer-reports dept.
ChaoticCoyote writes "I've posted a comparison of recent GCC versions (3.3, 3.4, and the coming 4.0) with Intel C++ 8.1, including several benchmarks and "state-of-the-product" reviews. The new article replaces an older piece I published in late 2002. This new comparison marks what I hope will be an ongoing series that tracks the quality of Linux compilers."
Announcements

Toorcon - 20 Years after Big Brother 7

Posted by michael from the guard-your-passwords-well dept.
Dumpster Diver writes "Toorcon is San Diego's own hacker/security conference happening right around the corner. September 24-26, for two day the conference will try to bridge the gap between intrusion and defense creating an environment that gets people motivated to learn, participate, and contribute to the community around them. This year's lineup of speakers looks amazing."
Graphics

Irrlicht - Fast Realtime 3D Engine 221

Posted by michael from the do-it-yourself dept.
Surye writes "Though a few days late on the release, Irrlicht has released version 0.7 of its engine. The site describes it as 'an open source high performance realtime 3D engine written in C++. It is completely cross-platform, using D3D, OpenGL and its own software renderer, and has all of the state-of-the-art features which can be found in commercial 3d engines.' Bindings for java, perl, ruby, and python, and it is platform independent (only implemented currently on Windows and Linux, but when it moves to other platforms, the code will be completely portable). The feature list is simply amazing, and since it's still being quite actively developed, I can see this becoming a major player soon."

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