Coders toolbox binary options

Documentação Produtos necessários: Embedded Coder x00AE. Fixed-Point Designerx2122, Simulink x00AE. Introdução aos Deslocamentos por Produtos de Geração de Código MATLAB x00AE Coderx2122. Simulink Coder. E codificador incorporado geram o código de C que usa as línguas de C deslocam o ltlt esquerdo e os operadores direitos do gtgt do deslocamento. Os compiladores C modernos fornecem comportamento consistente para operadores de turno. No entanto, alguns comportamentos dos operadores de deslocamento não são totalmente definidos por alguns padrões C. Quando você trabalha com os produtos de geração de código MathWorks x00AE, você precisa saber como gerenciar o uso de turnos C. Twos Complemento Twos complemento é uma maneira de interpretar um número binário. A maioria dos processadores modernos representam números inteiros usando o complemento twos. Os produtos de geração de código MathWorks x00AE requerem compiladores C e C para representar inteiros assinados usando o complemento de dois. As caixas de ferramentas e a utilização de documentação do MathWorks complementam a representação exclusivamente. Mudanças Aritméticas e Lógicas A principal diferença entre uma mudança aritmética e uma mudança lógica é a intenção. Mudanças aritméticas têm um significado matemático. A intenção de mudanças lógicas é mover bits ao redor, tornando-os úteis somente para inteiros não assinados sendo usados ​​como coleções de sinalizadores de bits. A linguagem C não distingue entre as mudanças aritméticas e lógicas e fornece apenas um conjunto de operadores de deslocamento. Quando os produtos de geração de código MathWorks usam deslocamentos em inteiros assinados no código gerado, a intenção é sempre uma mudança aritmética. Para inteiros não assinados, não há nenhuma diferença detectável no comportamento entre mudanças lógicas e aritméticas. Deslocamentos Esquerdados Aritméticos Um deslocamento esquerdo aritmético representa a multiplicação por uma potência de 2. Se o valor produzido pela multiplicação por 2b for muito grande, ocorre um estouro. No caso de um estouro, a resposta ideal envolve modulo 2 n para caber no tipo de dados. O padrão C90 especifica o comportamento do lado esquerdo. No nível de bits, b dos bits são deslocados para fora da extremidade esquerda e descartados. No lado direito, b bits de valor 0 são deslocados dentro. O padrão não especifica uma diferença entre unsigned e assinado. Para assinatura não assinada e twos complementada, o comportamento de nível de bit fornece o comportamento aritmético esquerdo desejado. O padrão C99 descreve a interpretação aritmética. Ele também afirma que para tipos assinados, o comportamento é indefinido para qualquer valor negativo ou para um valor positivo que iria transbordar. Um fornecedor de compilador pode explorar a cláusula de comportamento padrão indefinido C99 para otimizar o código de uma maneira que altera o comportamento pretendido pelo codificador. Se o compilador for compatível com C99 mas não compatível com C90, desative a opção Substituir multiplicações por potências de dois com mudanças de bit assinadas (Embedded Coder). Padrões C mais velhos seguem o padrão C90 em relação ao turno esquerdo. Padrões C mais recentes são semelhantes ao padrão C99. Deslocamentos Aritméticos Direito Um deslocamento direito aritmético representa a divisão por uma potência de 2, onde o quociente ideal arredonda ao chão. Quando a é não negativo, os padrões C afirmam que o deslocamento à direita deve fornecer esse comportamento aritmético. Se a é assinado e negativo, então o padrão afirma que a implementação define o comportamento. O padrão C requer que os compiladores documentem seu comportamento de implementação. Quase todos os compiladores implementam o direito de deslocamento assinado como uma mudança aritmética que arredonda para o chão. Este é o comportamento mais simples e mais eficiente para o fornecedor do compilador fornecer. Se você tem um compilador que não fornece aritmética direita-shift, ou seus padrões de codificação não permitem que você use o direito-deslocamento assinado, então você pode selecionar opções que evite deslocamento assinado à direita. Por exemplo, Permitir alternâncias diretas em inteiros assinados (Embedded Coder) substitui as mudanças de direita assinadas por uma chamada de função. Deslocações fora de intervalo Em C, ao mudar um inteiro do comprimento da palavra n. Use uma quantidade de deslocamento entre 0 e n 8211 1, inclusive. O padrão C não define deslocamento por outros valores, tais como: Deslocamento por uma constante negativa. Deslocamento em uma quantidade maior do que o comprimento da palavra. Quando o valor do deslocamento é constante, os produtos não geram mudanças fora do intervalo. O risco de deslocamentos fora de intervalo provém de mudanças explicitamente modeladas onde a quantidade de deslocamento é uma variável não constante. Ao modelar turnos com quantidades de deslocamento variável, certifique-se de que a quantidade de deslocamento está sempre na faixa. Modelando fontes de mudanças Existem fontes explícitas e implícitas de mudanças em modelos e algoritmos. Operações de bit de fluxo de estado x00AE Operações de ponto fixo que envolvem uma mudança de escala Quando a conversão de escalonamento de ponto fixo, se a mudança de inclinação líquida não for uma potência exata de dois, uma multiplicação seguida por uma mudança aproxima o declive líquido ideal. Para obter mais informações sobre computação de inclinação de rede, consulte Manipular computação de declive líquido (Fixed-Point Designer). Algoritmos de nível superior subjacentes (por exemplo, algoritmos FFT) Controle de Deslocamentos no Código Gerado Vários parâmetros de configuração têm um efeito no número e estilo de mudanças que aparecem no código gerado. Defina este parâmetro como Piso ou Zero para evitar código gerado extra. Quando ativado, este parâmetro usa a divisão em vez da multiplicação seguida por deslocamentos para executar a computação de declive líquido de ponto fixo. Quando esse parâmetro é ativado, as multiplicações por potências de dois são substituídas por desvios bit a bit assinados. Limpar esta opção suporta a conformidade MISRA C x00AE. Quando esse parâmetro está habilitado, o código gerado pode conter desvios no bit direito em inteiros assinados. Para evitar movimentos bit a bit direitos em inteiros assinados, desmarque esta opção. Selecione esse parâmetro se o compilador C implementar um desvio de direita inteira assinado como um deslocamento direito aritmético. Selecione seu paísO manual fornece informações detalhadas sobre como jogar. Se você é novo no jogo, nosso Tutorial irá mostrar como configurar sua primeira rota de transporte e continuar expandindo sua rede a partir daí. Se você já jogou Transporte Tycoon antes, você pode gostar de ler a comparação de OpenTTD e Tycoon Transporte Deluxe para ver o que mudou. Se youve jogado TTDPatch que contém algumas das mesmas melhorias como OpenTTD, também temos uma comparação de recursos OpenTTD e TTDPatch. Finalmente, para quaisquer questões gerais, consulte as FAQ. Esta seção abrange todos os aspectos do desenvolvimento OpenTTD não gráfico. Para aqueles novos para o desenvolvimento, o FAQ deve responder a quaisquer perguntas que você tem. Você pode então passar para o desenvolvimento atual ou ajudar com a tradução, se desejar. Você pode ver o changelog e ler através da seção de desenvolvimento dos fóruns ou se juntar ao nosso canal de IRC se você está interessado no estado atual do projeto. Também compilamos uma lista ou características desejadas se você estiver interessado em começar a escrever patches para o próprio OpenTTD. A seção de gráficos é onde artistas, codificadores de motores NewGRF e outros desenvolvedores relacionados a gráficos colaboram no desenvolvimento de gráficos. Saiba mais sobre os últimos desenvolvimentos em gráficos base, NewGrfs (tanto 8bpp e 32bpp) e muito mais. Além disso, não se esqueça de verificar a seção Recursos do Player abaixo para outros recursos relacionados a gráficos. A Comunidade OpenTTD Se você quiser saber mais, ajude a escrever documentação ou obtenha mais ajuda para a jogabilidade, confira o seguinte: Ajuda com a Documentação A documentação do OpenTTD é armazenada e editada usando este wiki. Sinta-se livre para começar a editar assim que você achar que pode, mas leia o Manual de Estilo primeiro. E fazer todos os testes no Sandbox. Visite a bomba da aldeia para discutir quaisquer alterações ou adições importantes à documentação, ou você pode começar diretamente em solicitações postadas nos pedidos do artigo. Também: Alguns artigos necessitam mudanças menores para satisfazer nossas necessidades, e há uma lista destes. Se você não se sente até a escrever artigos completos, então este pode ser um lugar melhor para começar. Há também alguns artigos que exigem mais trabalho antes que eles possam ser chamados de concluído e você pode pesquisá-los na categoria Expandir. Finalmente, raramente existem artigos sobre eventos atuais que se tornarão desatualizados - por que não verificar as informações nestes ainda está atual se você tiver um momento livre Você precisa de mais ajuda que o manual não pode fornecer Então, experimente nossos fóruns. A principal fonte de ajuda e informações sobre os desenvolvedores, ou junte-se ao nosso canal de IRC. Esta é uma lista de recursos que você pode achar útil que não fazem parte do manual. Programmers Toolbox CppCon 2016 Vídeos e apresentações são enviados em 2016-09-24 Esta semana, duas conferências interessantes aconteceram, CppCon 2016 e Java ONE 2016, mas Vou deixar Java para outro dia. Agora, meu foco está passando pelo conjunto já disponível de apresentações e vídeos. Vídeos estão subindo lentamente no YouTube, mas os já disponíveis são muito bons: Dan Saks conversa foi bastante divertido, especialmente quando combinado com Jason Turners falar. Embora C sofra as mesmas maneiras de escrever código inseguro como C, devido à sua compatibilidade linguística, ele fornece muitas melhorias para escrever código mais seguro com zero abstrações. Portanto, a transição para C, ao mesmo tempo em que aproveita os recursos ditos, já seria uma melhora em nossas pilhas de computação atuais. O problema é transmitir a mensagem. E se esses desenvolvedores não acreditam em C, muito menos mudando para algo como Swift, D ou Rust, a menos que seja imposta sobre eles. Como mencionado os slides também estão disponíveis e você pode obter a maioria deles a partir do repositório Githuba. Kenny Kerr também apresentou seu trabalho na Microsoft em substituir C / CX com recursos padrão C17, com o nome atual de C / WinRT como nome da estrutura, e os slides relacionados são disponibilizados em seu site. Voltando às apresentações, houve algumas interessantes relacionadas à programação funcional em C, uso de algoritmos e segurança de tipos, remoção de recursos obsoletos, computação heterogênea e paralela, uso de IoT e Cs na indústria de jogos. Também estou ansioso para ter Herb Sutters falar disponíveis no YouTube, como ele estava apresentando as melhores práticas para tirar proveito do gerenciamento de memória automática em C e uma nova biblioteca para a contagem de referência diferida. Dado os últimos movimentos no eco-sistema do Windows Phone, decidi que não vale a pena continuar a desenvolver aplicações para a plataforma, a saber: a Microsoft disparou outro conjunto de Empregos que trabalham em equipas Windows Phone Amazon anunciou que iria soltar o seu app WP O antigo Nokia aqui Maps, também caiu a plataforma Microsofts própria Skype, caiu suporte para 8.x ainda mantém XP apoio Por isso, foi muito divertido para desenvolver alguma prova de conceito Aplicativos para o Windows Phone 8.x com C e C / CX, mas dado todas essas mudanças é bastante óbvio que o futuro do UWP está em toda parte, mas o espaço móvel. Ele vai certamente prosperar no desktop, laptops híbridos, HoloLens e XBox, mas eu duvido muito que não há qualquer vida deixada em telefones celulares para ele. Como tal eu tenho focado apenas no Android e para terminar com uma nota positiva, fiquei muito feliz em descobrir que o próximo Android Studio 2.2 tem um suporte muito melhorado para C, especialmente a nova integração com CMake. Embora o Google não o declare oficialmente, parece que ndk-build e o plugin experimental Gradle podem eventualmente ser depreciados e substituídos pelo recém-introduzido suporte ao CMake. Virtual Machines Summer School 2016 já estão disponíveis em 2016-07-25 Os vídeos desta época As Virtual Machines Summer School foram publicados e agora estão on-line. Existem muitas palestras interessantes disponíveis, as que eu achei mais interessantes foram: Bits of Advice para o VM Writer Building High Performance, Coletores de Lixo Completamente Concorrentes Uma História Concisa e Otimista de Máquinas Virtuais As palestras estavam cheias de sutis detalhes técnicos sobre a implementação VMs e melhorar seu desempenho. C17 e C NDC track submetido em 2016-06-26 O C17 Committee Draft (CD) acaba de ser aprovado no último sábado, dia 25. Existe uma boa lista de todos os recursos que foram aprovados no Reddit. Também os organizadores da conferência NDC acaba de lançar seus vídeos eo site da ISO C tem uma lista de todas as apresentações relacionadas ao C. Daqueles que eu pessoalmente gostei: Os de Andrei Alexandrescu como sempre O C Type System é seu Amigo Usando o C STL Sem Memória Dinâmica Os Modelos de Memória C e CLR, bastante interessante para qualquer pessoa que faça programação multicore. Rust foi lançado em 2015-10-29 Rust acaba de receber uma nova versão. A melhor notícia para aqueles de nós que passam a maior parte do nosso tempo no Windows é a integração com a ferramenta Visual C, em vez de confiar na ferramenta MinGW / MSYS2. Tempo para atualizar a instalação atual. JavaOne 2015 está em curso apresentado em 2015-10-26 O JavaOne 2015 começou no último domingo e as notas-chave já estão disponíveis para assistir na demanda para aqueles que não podem participar. As diretrizes centrais C, que melhoram a segurança C, são apresentadas em 2015-09-27 Esta semana o CppCon 2015 ocorreu, com uma visão muito Importantes apresentações feitas por Bjarne Stroustrup e Herb Sutter, entre algumas outras celebridades C. Eles apresentaram as Diretrizes Centrais C um conjunto de diretrizes para o uso de C bem, focado na escrita de código seguro. Atualmente, o foco principal foi a segurança da memória, mas são planejadas mais áreas como, por exemplo, Simultaneidade. As diretrizes são escritas de forma que elas podem ser aplicadas por um compilador ou uma ferramenta de análise estática. Herb Sutter e Neil MacIntosh demoed o protótipo que a Microsoft está planejando para entregar com Visual Studio 2015 Update 1. Um dos resultados mais interessantes das diretrizes é que a comunidade C está ciente do trabalho a ser feito sobre Rust e ver tipos afins como uma forma Para melhorar a segurança Cs. No entanto, em vez de tornar a linguagem ainda mais complexa, o plano é que o mesmo tipo de regras de propriedade pode ser validado com a ajuda de uma ferramenta de validação de diretrizes. Como alguém que gosta de linguagens de segurança de memória, admiro o trabalho que a comunidade Cs está colocando em segurança. Rust 1.3 Lançado em 2015-09-22 Rust versão 1.3 acaba de ser lançado. Você pode obtê-lo no lugar habitual O foco principal foi o desempenho e melhorar o suporte do Windows, que deve ser totalmente feito pela versão 1.4. Vídeos de 2015 C Rússia enviada em 2015-06-14 De todas as palestras mostradas em C Rússia, dois deles chamaram minha atenção para: Ambas as palestras são sobre temas que trazem C moderna em termos de explicar como desfrutar de memória de programação segura, mesmo Se o idioma não é seguro por padrão. E também como desfrutar de programação funcional em C. A linguagem de apresentação é o Inglês. Swift é uma fonte aberta. OpenGL é esquecido pelo Metal Enviado em 2015-06-07 A Apple acaba de anunciar na WWDC 2015 Keynote que Swift está sendo feita de código aberto e disponível em vários sistemas operacionais. Gostaria de saber como isso afetará Rust, dadas as similaridades de línguas. O Metal também está disponível no Mac OS X e todos os frameworks de renderização acelerados que foram construídos em cima do OpenGL foram migrados para usar o Metal em vez disso. Este pode ser o início da demissão do OpenGL nas plataformas da Apple. Eu duvido agora que a Apple vai gastar qualquer esforço melhorando o suporte OpenGL ou adicionando suporte Vulkan em seus sistemas operacionais. Então, em uma reviravolta da ironia, a mesma empresa que resgatou OpenGL de ser ignorado pelos desenvolvedores de jogos, ao incluí-la como iOS 3D API, decide substituí-la por sua própria API. Para o próximo Windows 10, a Microsoft vem pesquisando facilitando a vida de desenvolvedores de iOS e ecossistemas Android para trazer suas aplicações para o eco-sistema do Windows. O suporte à migração do Android será feito através do Project Astoria. Enquanto o suporte iOS será fornecido via Project Islandwood. Embora ambos compartilhem o objetivo comum de executar outros aplicativos do SO como Aplicativos Universal do Windows, eles oferecem diferentes níveis de integração. O projeto Astoria oferecerá compatibilidade Android dentro de um ambiente de contêiner, um tipo de Windows Android Runtime, mesmo se o exemplo for um pouco esticado. Considerando que o Project Islandwood, fará Objective-C uma linguagem de primeira classe no Visual Studio, oferecendo o mesmo nível de acesso ao SO do que C goza. Em qualquer caso, parece que a Microsoft pode estar tentando sua própria versão da compatibilidade OS / 2 que acabou matando o sistema operacional. Embora seja claro que o sistema operacional precisa de um grande impulso para torná-lo relevante para os desenvolvedores, não tenho certeza se foi uma boa decisão, dado como tentativas similares continuamente falhou. DConf 2015 enviado em 2015-06-01 Enquanto o mundo estava focado no Google IO 2015, outros eventos interessantes estavam acontecendo. Um desses eventos foi DConf 2015. A conferência de desenvolvedores para a linguagem de programação D. Os slides já estão disponíveis nas respectivas palestras que estão listadas na agenda de conferências. Os vídeos não editados já estão disponíveis no YouTube para aqueles que desejam ver o que aconteceu na conferência: Dia 1, tarde Dia 2 Dia 3 Versões melhores serão postas mais tarde. Apenas olhe para fora o Web site da língua de programação de D para a notícia. Alguns dos mais interessantes para mim foram: Como D está sendo usado para implementar um sistema de armazenamento. Um estudo de caso sobre D que está sendo usado para o desenvolvimento de Hedge Fund Chuck Allison s falar sobre a sua transição de C para D Andrei Alexandrescus falar sobre os novos alocadores que vêm para D Basta hop no site, como há muito interessante alguns, além daqueles . Finalizando meu exercício de busca apresentado em 2015-05-26 Depois de brincar com Qt, SDL e outras tentativas para uma implementação portátil entre o Android eo Windows Phone, minha experiência está chegando ao fim. Foi uma experiência interessante, combinando Java e C no lado do Android e C com C / CX no lado do Windows Phone / Store. Embora o aplicativo não é totalmente produtified, o objetivo de compreender o esforço de escrever aplicações portáteis sem bibliotecas de terceiros adicionais foi alcançado. Para as empresas que visam várias plataformas, Qt e Xamarin são realmente a melhor maneira de ir nativo. Qt melhorou muito desde o meu último discurso. O esforço para adicionar wrappers nativos adicionais é menor do que todo o processo de desenvolvimento. No entanto, para desenvolvedores individuais, talvez seja melhor se concentrar em uma única plataforma. Essas camadas de portabilidade somam um custo extra para todo o processo de desenvolvimento, especialmente em termos de wrappers extras e depuração, o que pode ser muito caro para desenvolvedores individuais. Todos em todos os, foi muito gratificante experiência. O resultado final está agora disponível no site. Rust finalmente chegou à versão 1.0 enviada em 2015-05-15 Hora de comemorar para os fãs de línguas ML e sistemas de memória de programação segura. A primeira versão estável de Rust foi lançado Bastante uma linguagem diferente quando comparado com o design original, ainda era para melhor. Estou ansioso para ver como sua adoção vai acabar. Parabéns a todos os envolvidos em torná-lo realidade. Programação funcional em Swift submetido em 2015-04-18 Apenas assisti uma apresentação de Chris Eidhof sobre programação funcional em Swift. Ele vai sobre o processo de adaptar o que são originalmente imperativo OO algoritmos em funcional ones. Muito interessante para observar aqueles que pensam em passar de Objective-C para Swift, especialmente como adaptar linguagens multi-paradigma. Rust 1.0 beta foi lançado Enviado em 2015-04-04 A equipe Rust acaba de anunciar o lançamento da versão 1.0 beta. A data de uma versão 1.0 estável está agora 6 semanas de distância, de acordo com o plano atual. Eu desejo Rust torna-se mainstream, como uma maneira de aumentar o conjunto de linguagens ML disponíveis disponíveis para escolher. Faça um Lisp. Polyglot tutorial para intérpretes. Submetido em 2015-03-08 Uma discussão recente sobre HN me fez ciente do projeto Make a Lisp. Uma idéia interessante de seguir um tutorial multi-passo sobre como implementar um interpretador Lisp inspirado por Clojure, proposto por Joel Martin. Se você estiver em desenvolvimento de linguagem de programação, basta clonar o repositório Github, escolher a sua linguagem de programação favorita e ter um ir no guia de implementação. Rust 1.0.0 ² 2 lançado em 2015-02-24 Mozilla lançou recentemente a versão Rust 1.0.0alpha.2. Outro passo mais perto de ter a versão 1.0.0 pronta para o horário nobre. Realmente ansioso para ter outra alternativa moderna para a programação de sistemas. CoreCLR agora desembarcou no GitHub enviado em 2015-02-03 A Microsoft acaba de anunciar que o componente CoreCLR para o código aberto. Isso é realmente ótimo. Agora, além de ter Mono como implementação alternativa para. NET, temos o proprietário da plataforma trazendo à realidade o que foi discutido há alguns meses sobre abraçar a comunidade. NET através de plataformas. Hoje em dia eu realmente gosto da plataforma e tenho muita diversão desenvolvendo aplicativos C e F nele. Bastante engraçado para fechar de volta aos primeiros dias. NET, que eu era privilegiado para participar, graças à empresa que eu estava trabalhando no momento sendo um Parceiro Microsoft. Como muitos devotos de Java, eu me queixei em alta voz. NET sendo uma cópia flagrante do Java. Avanço rápido quase 15 anos e enquanto ambas as plataformas ainda compartilham um monte de conceitos e estruturas, eles são bastante diferentes hoje em dia. E minha opinião também mudou, independentemente das razões comerciais por trás de sua criação. NET é uma plataforma muito boa para desenvolver o software, e. NET Native vai torná-lo ainda melhor. Por isso, é bastante agradável ver a Microsoft compartilhar o. NET com o mundo em geral e, com ele, permitir que desenvolvedores fora do sistema eco-Windows também possam implantar aplicativos baseados em. NET em sua plataforma de escolha. C14 Bibliotecas enviadas em 2014-11-04 Enquanto navega para informações relacionadas C14, descobri que o site C Rocks contém uma lista de bibliotecas compatíveis com C14. Dê uma olhada neles, eles fazem um bom uso de recursos modernos C. Existem bibliotecas para um uso semelhante ao LINQ, testes unitários, análise de JSON, processamento de imagem, formatação segura de cadeias, programação funcional reativa e muitos outros. Ferrugem em Windows. Apresentado em 2014-11-03 Eu só consegui obter Rust 0.12.0 executando no Windows Este é grandes sinais do progresso feito pela equipe Rust. Quanto às versões anteriores ainda tinha alguns problemas a serem instalados no Windows e versões específicas mingw. Finalmente eu sou capaz de jogar com ele no meu laptop de trabalho. Vídeos Sweet CppCon já estão disponíveis. Apresentada em 2014-10-04 A maior conferência C do ano, a CppCon, terminou há algumas semanas. Os vídeos estão agora disponíveis no YouTube e nos slides do Github. Algumas das melhores conversas foram relacionadas ao uso de C moderno, significando usar a biblioteca de coleções C, RAII e gerenciamento de memória automática. C como a codificação deve ser deixado os poucos casos onde cada aumento de desempenho conta. Agora que C tem lambdas, algumas das palestras também foram focadas na programação funcional, o que foi bastante interessante para ver a comunidade abraçando programação funcional, especialmente dado que ltalgorithm. hgt já existe desde C98. Uma conversa interessante para conhecer o ponto de vista da indústria de jogos sobre C foi Mike Actons falar sobre design orientado a dados e seu uso no desenvolvimento de jogos. Embora eu não concordo com alguns de seus pontos de vista, sua conversa é bastante interessante. Tudo em tudo, moderno C está olhando muito bom e tenho que conceed algumas das minhas reclamações antigas não são mais válidos quando comparado com C14. Qt ainda não está totalmente pronto para o celular. Um pequeno discurso. Enviado em 2014-09-21 Durante os últimos dias eu tentei usar Qt com C para dar uma interface do usuário para a minha implementação de pesquisa que eu também poderia facilmente porta entre as plataformas de desktop e celulares que tenho à minha disposição. Como normalmente acontece no que nós, desenvolvedores de software, consideramos uma tarefa simples. Acabou levando mais tempo do que o esperado com resultados decepcionantes. O primeiro problema foi o tamanho. 40 MB é apenas demais para uma janela simples que renderiza um mapa com o respectivo caminho, se encontrado. Especialmente quando segmentação de dispositivos onde o espaço é em prémio. Então veio o primeiro showstopper. Quando tentei implantar o aplicativo no Android, a caixa de diálogo do arquivo que é mostrada é uma desktop padrão. Impossível de usar em telas pequenas e completamente fora de lugar no Android. A versão atual do Qt é 5.3 e, aparentemente, o próximo 5.4 resolverá este problema. Mas somente quando se usa Qt Quick para a UI como Qt / C puro parece estar a caminho. Eu ponderou para escrever um diálogo de arquivo-me, mas que iria bater o propósito de usar um kit de ferramentas multi-plataforma em primeiro lugar. Portanto, para preparar o aplicativo para os controles atualizados, uma reescrita estava em ordem. O que levou a mais desperdício de tempo como eu tentei entender as diferenças entre a versão QML inicial eo atual, como recodificar os widgets C para ser utilizável a partir de QML e lutando contra o editor QML que tinha alguns problemas vendo as últimas mudanças do C lado. Isto adicionou também a complexidade de ter ainda uma outra camada neste sanduíche da portabilidade. A fim de contornar um problema de usabilidade, não só o meu programa teve de lidar com o C e Java interações. Agora também precisava cuidar das interações Qt Quick (JavaScript) e C. Depois que a reescrita foi concluída e funcionando corretamente no simulador, era hora de implantá-lo em dispositivos reais. Só para ser recebido por uma tela branca vazia Então, em conclusão, a minha experiência Qt foi um fracasso. Com a quantidade de tempo que eu perdi lutar estes problemas, eu poderia ter implementado um Android e Windows Phone UIs usando suas línguas nativas suportados vez. E o UX global que eu poderia fornecer seria muito melhor. Que foi na verdade, o que eu acabei fazendo. Ditching Qt e uma re-escrita final usando apenas as tecnologias fornecidas com os SDKs móveis. Às vezes, demasiada abstração dificulta, em vez de ajudar. CppCon 2014 Speaker Materials submetido em 2014-09-15 A conferência C do ano, CppCon 2014, teve lugar na semana passada e foi um enorme sucesso. De acordo com Herb Sutter foi uma conferência muito boa como C11 e C14 padrões realmente trouxe uma nova vida na língua. Graças aos erros de outros fornecedores de linguagem, atualmente C é a única linguagem comum a todos os SDKs móveis. Houve muitas conversas sobre C moderno e também da indústria de jogos. Basta tirar as apresentações enquanto eles ainda estão quentes. C14 é agora a mais recente revisão padrão C submetida em 2014-09-19 Isto é o que acontece quando se está de férias. O novo C14 foi lançado e eu recentemente cheguei a conferir. Este é outro passo para melhorar a linguagem em termos de segurança e paradigmas modernos. Ainda ansioso para eventualmente ter lite conceitos e módulos de apoio, mas que só está prevista para a próxima revisão. Enquanto C não é Ada em termos de segurança, C11 / 14 melhora muito a habilidade de escrever código seguro quando as abstrações de linguagem correspondentes são tomadas em uso. Michel Wong forneceu uma visão geral do C14 sobre IBM C / C Cafe Agora vamos ver quanto tempo todos os principais compiladores C levam para atingir a conformidade completa, em desktops, servidores e plataformas embutidas. Uma introdução à Rust para programadores OCaml em apresentações de mozilla de ar apresentado em 2014-08-17 Há uma conversa no site mozilla de ar sobre Rust para desenvolvedores com experiência de ML, ou seja, OCaml. Eu gosto de como Rust está evoluindo para a versão 1.0. Anil Madhavapeddy no Sistema Operacional Cloud Mirage eo OCaml Language apresentado em 2014-07-27 Um par de meses atrás, Anil Madhavapeddy, um dos principais drivers por trás do sistema operacional Mirage foi entrevistado na Rádio Engenharia de Software. Eu só encontrei sobre isso agora e foi quited satisfeito com a entrevista. Sua aproximação em usar uma linguagem de programação funcional como OCaml para o projeto do sistema operando-se, com ênfase na exatidão e na segurança é a maneira para a frente para o projeto de sistema operacional no século XXI. Hoje em dia temos estagnado com lotes de clones UNIX, e abordagens como esta são louváveis, tentando melhorar as arquiteturas de sistemas operacionais. Especialmente provando que é possível usar um idioma como OCaml para essas tarefas. Sem mais delongas, a entrevista está disponível aqui. Swift, a nova linguagem nos ecossistemas do Mac OS X e iOS apresentados em 2014-06-06 O melhor anúncio nesta keynote anos WWDC foi uma nova linguagem de programação desenvolvida pela Apple, chamada Swift. A linguagem tem uma certa sensação ML, as minhas características favoritas são: Associações Descriminate Padrão de correspondência ML inferência de tipos Métodos de extensão Generics Gestão de memória automática Tipos de valor Memory safe O associar ferramentas também tem algumas características relevantes: AOT compilação para código nativo A Apple prefere AOT mais JIT) REPL com um storyboard interativo para programação exploratória Objective-C interoperabilidade para reutilização de código Estou ansioso para ver Swift tomar Objective-Cs como a principal linguagem de programação no ecossistema Mac. Pode não ser Dylan, mas é muito perto. Oberon artigo atualizado com novas informações de download enviado em 2014-05-19 O desenvolvedor responsável por Oberon / A2 / AOS imagens ISO apenas notificado meu que o local mudou. O artigo foi atualizado em conformidade. Muito obrigado pelo feedback dado. Lisp, Clojure, F conjunto de negociações apresentadas em 2014-03-22 Eu só assisti a um conjunto de palestras em torno de programação funcional, todos eles muito interessante. As três primeiras palestras estão localizadas em Skills Matter e requerem registro para assisti-las, mas vale a pena. Bastante interessante ver programação funcional finalmente se tornando apenas mais uma ferramenta em nossa caixa de ferramentas. TownGL amostra disponível enviado em 2014-03-16 Um novo projeto gráfico, TownGL. Foi adicionado à seção. É um porto de um antigo exercício inicialmente feito em C com OpenGL 1.1. Em 1999, a duas plataformas modernas distintas. A Web, via JavaScript com bibliotecas WebGL e ThreeJS. O mundo móvel nativo, via C11 com OpenGL ES e SDL 2.0, apenas o Android foi testado até agora. O objetivo principal era refrescar um pouco o meu conhecimento OpenGL, ao mesmo tempo ter um pouco de diversão, tanto com JavaScript e C. Controlando o passado para dirigir o futuro apresentado em 2014-03-15 Apenas assisti a uma apresentação de Gilad Bracha nomeado Funnyly Onward - O Pensamento Pago do Crime. O ponto que está sendo feito, é como as linguagens mais produtivas e coerentes como Lisp, Smalltalk, Beta, Newspeak foram, e como eles não conseguiram impressionar os desenvolvedores médio, devido ao tempo difícil inovadores têm mudar a mentalidade atual de como as coisas devem ser. A maioria das chamadas línguas modernas, na verdade, estão redescobrindo o que essas línguas ofereciam em termos de recursos e ferramentas, mas geralmente feitas a meio caminho. Que só oferece um tipo de experiência, quando comparado como ele usa para se sentir usando essa funcionalidade. Assim linguagem designers devem olhar adequadamente olhar para o passado, ao projetar a experiência das linguagens de programação do futuro. Conversa muito interessante, como Gilad Bracha sempre faz. D port of the memory queue tutorial updated submitted on 2014-02-24 The D port of the Memory Queue tutorial, queue-d. has been updated. Writing a Nanopass Compiler submitted on 2014-02-09 So this weekend I have been busy with Scheme and compiler related development. In order to keep up the trend, there was a presentation at Clojure TV about the use of Nanopass as compilation technique for Chez Scheme. The main idea behind it, is to design the compiler passes in such a way that they are composed by very small passes that are then plugged together. In comparisasion with traditional compiler passes, it allows for a more modular development of such passes. Incremental Parallelization of Dynamic Languages presentation submitted on 2014-02-08 There is a very interesting presentation over at air Mozilla channel about making Rackets runtime, a Scheme dialect, capable of parallel and concurrent operations. Making peace with Go submitted on 2014-02-03 Long time ago I posted how disappointed I was with the decisions being taken about Gos design. Since then, I have been spending time around D and Rust communities. I also started to follow the work being done at Cisco with OCaml safe systems programming . Meanwhile, Go has been taking up speed by many startups, mainly by developers that consider Gos simple design as a positive feature and not an impediment as I and others see it. Currently, at least dynamic linking, dynamic loading are being working on and there is a way to fake enumerations with const groups. Given that the uprise in any safe compiled language should be actually considered a good thing, I think to carry on discussing about generics in Go is a waste of time. Most likely they will never come. So instead of wasting energy discussing it, better to spend time contributing to any FOSS project, even Go. As a concluding thought, if you are planning to write any application in C and Gos simplicity is attractive to you, I would advise to try to prototype it in Go. You might never come back to C afterwards. HTML 5 vs native development submitted on 2014-01-29 The persons that know me are well aware that I am really supporting of native technologies, even though I do take part in many web projects. Maybe because of it, as most of those projects tend to have a mix of spaghetti code composed of scattered JavaScript, CSS and HTML hacks, as a means to work properly across all required platforms. This is just plain wrong, when compared how simple it is to handle layouts and components in native frameworks and older systems like HyperCard or Smalltalk . However, regardless of how one thinks about it, the industry is going more and more into the HTML 5 direction, so the best way it to adapt rather than being left behind. So I was rather pleased to discover AngularJS. as it seems to bring a bit of native code development sanity to the web. I will surely be playing quite a bit with it. Using Rust for OS development submitted on 2014-01-05 I just read an article article posted on Hacker News about using Rust on an undergraduate course for operating system design. While I dont agree with everything that is said on the article, specially in regard to D, I find it very positive that a teacher decided to pick up a safer language for systems programming besides C. We need safer languages for systems programming and new generations are usually unaware that there were operating systems developded in other programming languages, besides C. And being safe does not mean requiring a VM runtime. C does improve lots of defiencies about C, specially when using C11/14, coupled with STL, but the C underpinnings of the language are the Achilles ankle in security. Who knows, maybe sometime in the future we will have a mainstream OS developed in such language..NET gets a new JIT compiler submitted on 2013-10-10 The. NET team at Microsoft just announced a new JIT compiler named. RyuJIT . Apparently it is based on the same backed as Visual C and they are planning to bring all the optimization goodies from their compiler into. NET land. This are quite good news, given that Microsoft hasnt invested that much on their JIT compiler in the last. NET releases in terms of automatic vectorization of code, access to SIMD operations and similar optimizations. Going Native 2013 videos now available submitted on 2013-09-13 The videos and slides from the sessions at Going Native 2013 are now available at Microsofts Channel 9. It is full of worthwhile content about Cs use in the industry, specially what is nowadays currently known as Modern C, thanks to the use of C11 and C14 constructs. For a graphics loving guy like myself, the informations about openFramewors and Cinder C libraries was also quite interesting Myself I am currently looking into Cinder. ) submitted on 2013-07-17 Olve Maudal did a presentation about C undefined behaviors at the Norwegian Developers Conference 2013. Very worth a look, specially if you think you are quite confortable with C and C. In case you enjoyed the presentation and want to improve your knowledge about it, there are some slides available at slideshare. Take care of preparing some coffee as the presentation is quite long (445 pages). A very nice introduction to Clojure submitted on 2013-07-11 Neal Ford has done an introduction session about Clojure at the Norwegian Developers Conference 2013. If you still not know much about Clojure, it is very worthwhile to spend one hour of your time getting yourself acquainted with the wonders of Lisp based languages. The C Programming Language (4th Edition) just arrived submitted on 2013-07-04 Even with my complaints about how C and by implication C tend to be insecure, C is a powerful language that I always enjoyed exploring. Even using it as my main language in some of the jobs I worked on. Therefore I have been salivating for the new version, waiting for Bjarne Stroustrup to update it for the C11 standard. The new edition is full of updated examples how to use modern C, coupled with learnings how C evolved since C98 standard, it will surely be an interesting reading. An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction submitted on 2013-05-31 Someone called my attention to a nice paper about compiler construction, called An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction . The document goes over the process of implementing a Scheme subset compiler in Scheme itself using an easy understandable way. If you are looking to learn how compilers work, this is a very nice tutorial and I advise you to give it a shot. L98 compiler has been updated and made available on GitHub submitted on 2013-05-08 Sometime ago I discovered that the compiler project I have made available on this site was not compilable with recent versions of Java. The main issue being that it was developed back when Java initially released, and it was relying in quite a few compiler bugs that have since then been fixed, thus making the code not compilable. So I ended up porting the build system from a bunch of Makefiles into Maven, replacing the code which I didnt have distribution rights by a new runtime written in Assembly and taking advantage of new Java 7 features. Just head up to the L98 project area for the new version. The 2013 European LLVM Conference Videos are now available submitted on 2013-05-04 The last LLVM conference took place on the 29/30 April, the videos and corresponding slides are now available . Lots of nice stuff for developers with interest in compiler design. Using Ada in embedded design submitted on 2013-03-02 The embedded UBM Site about application development in embedded hardware, has published a newsletter about the current state of Ada for embedded development. I find it very interesting, because although C and Assembly still rule this space, Ada is a much better language in terms of safety to develop applications on. The reliance on C for application development is a path full of security holes unless you couple your development with warnings as errors compiler options and static code analyzers that bring C to the same safety level enjoyed by default in languages like Ada. I will be interesting to see how Adas adoption might improve in this space. Analyzer section updated submitted on 2013-02-17 Keeping up the trend to update site sections related to old projects without much information, the SWI Prolog Pascal analyzer has been updated. MapEditor updated for Visual C 2010 submitted on 2013-01-30 The 2D tile editor that I created for the 3P team project a few years ago, has been updated to compile against Visual C 2010. In the process I removed a few C style code parts by their MFC code, as now MFC offers better ways to write similar algorithms. Always a good excuse to improve code quality. MSDN Patterns and Practices publishes article about C XAML applications submitted on 2013-01-29 Microsoft just published an article from their Patterns and Pratices team, targeting the Windows Store (aka Metro applications) with C and XAML. The application is the already known Hilo sample, that Microsoft also used when Windows 7 was launched. RoboVM, LLVM based ahead-of-time Java compiler, with iOS target submitted on 2013-01-25 RoboVM is a new native code compiler for Java, targeting the iOS operating system. Finally someone is making some effort to allow Java developers to target native code compilation on iOS devices. It still surprises me that although many Java vendors do provide ahead of time compilation for their Java enviroments, Sun and now Oracle dont provide them. This leaves many developers with the wrong idea that there are only VM environments for Java, when actually that is not the case. I wish all the luck the RoboVM developers. Niklaus Wirth talk at GTAC 2009 submitted on 2013-01-19 Welcome to my first post of 2013 I wish you had good time during the festivities and an year full of health and good times, with family and friends. Now for the theme of this post. While searching for information about the Oberon family of operating systems, I discovered a video of a talk done by Niklaus Wirth at GTAC (Google Test Automation Conference), back in 2009. I find it always very interesting to hear what he says, specially given his background, which tends to not follow whatever is considered mainstream in the industry. He talks about the evolution of programming languages and testing along the years he has been involved in the computing world since his early days at the university. Here is the video. Enjoy Great chefs dont use mixes submitted on 2012-12-09 I just saw a short presentation (around 8m) from Christin Gorman about the bloat ORMs add to applications. Based on my ORM experience I fully agree, ORMs seems to be quite nice way of making a database mapping quite fast, however the time won in designing the application is lost keeping track of database mappings or tracking down which queries need optimization and ending up with a frankenstein application of ORM mappings and SQL. Usually if the project does not require any form of database ORM to be used, it is way better to make use of light weight mappings, or if constrained to a single database backend, to write the SQL directly. You will be saved from annotation/xml mapping verbosity by doing so, while being able to achieve high database performance. Inventing on Principle submitted on 2012-11-24 A very nice presentation by Bret Vitor entitled Inventing on Principle . This presentation goes around how the environment and the programming language should mingle and provide an interactive way to develop applications. In a way much more powerful than the usual REPL environments, or even what the typical Smalltalk and Lisp environments do offer. Khan Academy has a series of tutorials using JavaScript that apply the principles described on the talk. This talk also inspired another developer to create a dynamic environment for Clojure development entitled Light Table . The Frogatto and Friends game also has adopted some of these ideas into their game editor . A Mozilla developer also created a Firefox plugin to explore JavaScript development following the same principles, a video is available, showing how everything works. Althought the concepts shown at the talk are more relevant for doing UI related programming, it is an interesting concept that is surely worth one hour of time to go through the presentation. How the Dalvik VM JIT works submitted on 2012-11-13 I just found out the Google I/O 2010s presentation about how the Dalvik VM JIT was designed for the Android 2.2 release. I know it is a bit outdated, but it is still worth watching if you care about compiler development. MDIL, also known as. NET gone native submitted on 2012-11-10 Another announcement from Microsoft at BUILD 2012 is that for Windows Phone 8 devices. NET applications are actually also compiled to native code. There is no JIT on the devices, the applications downloaded from the Windows Store are already compiled for the specific device. Still it isnt 100 like C applications, because. NET only uses dynamic linking and Microsoft wants the applications to keep working after security or operating system updates are done to the device. So they went with a solution which keeps symbolic locations for the memory addresses while everything else is plain assembly code. The references are replaced by real memory locations when the application gets installed, by using an on device linker. This executable format is known as MDIL, Machine Dependent Intermediate Language. The compilation from MSIL into MDIL occurs on the Windows Store servers with an optimizing compiler. Now the question is when will Microsoft replace NGEN by MDIL for desktop applications. So far they dont confirm nor deny it. Herb Sutter announces updated C11 support at BUILD 2012 submitted on 2012-11-02 Herb Sutter just did a presentation at BUILD 2012 presenting the new set of C11 features to be made available with the upcomming Visual C 2012 November CTP release : explicit conversion operators initializers lists (STL support will be updated in the CTP following this one) Raw string literals delegating constructors variadic templates (with perfect forwarding) default template arguments Additionally it was announced the ammount of work Microsoft, Google, Intel, ARM and many other companies are putting into the C standard. A new web site for the C community is now available. The web site is backed from a new C foundation, which is a mix of ISO/ANSI members, C known individuals and companies with vested interest into the language. An overview of the ISO ongoing work was also announced, the biggest one being the new target date of having a standard update in 2014, before the schedule update of 2017. C is becoming a much more safer language for systems programming than C, as long as developers use modern C features. As a supporter of strong type languages for systems programming, it is rewarding to see C improving, even with better languages trying to get its place. It is a nice time to use languages with native code generation compilers. Advanced iOS Development submitted on 2012-10-27 InfoQ has placed an interesting presentation about advanced development in iOS with Objective-C. This is really the best way to bring wonderfull experiences to the customers, by exploring the native features each platform makes available to developers. Google uses Common Lisp submitted on 2012-10-13 So it seems that after IAT Software s aquisition by Google, Google has become another company also Common Lisp. To reinforced this, Common Lisp has made to the list of style guides Google keeps for all languages that are accepted for internal projects. Writing a Raytracer in Common Lisp submitted on 2012-09-16 So after some vacations, it is time to update this blog again. ) As two areas in computing that I like a lot are graphics programming and functional programming, it was very warming to have discovered a tutorial in YouTube that brings both of them together, by showing on how to implement a ray tracer in Lisp. Slides are also available at the authors web site. Faith, Evolution, and Programming Languages submitted on 2012-08-19 An interesting presentation done by Philip Wadler, about the influence of functional programming in mainstream languages. It is quite nice that after decades of being imprisoned inside academia, functional programming is becoming just another paradigm that most languages are starting to make available to common programmers. Functional-Style Programming in C submitted on 2012-08-17 This months MSDN Magazine has a very intersting article about doing functional programming in C, while taking advantage of the new C11 standard. submitted on 2012-08-12 Carrying on the functional programming subject, there is a nice presentation in the Nordic Developers Conferece 2012 about functional programming with F, as well as how to apply the same concepts in C 4.0. Quite handy, specially for those. NET developers that are only able to use C at work. submitted on 2012-08-04 A 1h30 session are length about real world usages of F and Haskell. This is a set of three talks done at Microsoft Research, showing how functional programming languages are slowly getting into the industry. WWDC 2012 videos and slides now available submitted on 2012-07-11 I just noticed that the presentation materials from WWDC 2012 are now available. If you are a Mac OS X or iOS developer, there are lots of good stuff to watch there. Im still going through the presentations, but one that I can already advise is Modern Objective-C. Apple is really spending some effort to make the language a bit more modern, bit by bit. This is specially important if you care about native code development. Even if you are not an Apple developer you can still enjoy the videos after doing the free registration as Apple developer. The CNow 2012, former BoostCon videos now available submitted on 2012-07-08 Last month I blogged that the papers from The CNow 2012 were made available, with the videos following some time later. The videos are now available. Enjoy. Having fun with Qt and C submitted on 2012-07-02 I just got asked to develop a desktop application. After considering the deployment scenarios and how users are supposed to use it, the decision which technologies to use ended up being C and Qt. As they are currently the best solution to develop native based applications for multiple operating systems. It really feels refreshing having to code in C, compared with my daily job of JVM and. NET languages. Sure the application takes a few more seconds to compile, but it is really worth it as seen by the application speed when using it. Coupled with Qt, C feels like a language with batteries, as quite a lot of funtionality is made available out of the box, without having to search the Internet for libraries. Plus it also offers quite a few helper classes that minimize the need of explicit memory management. Qt Creator IDE is a pleasure to use when compared to Java based IDEs, everything just works in less than one second, while keeping a nice IDE like experience. Microsoft caves in for Visual Studio Express version for Windows submitted on 2012-06-11 As it seems Microsft has given up on their plans to have the Visual Studio Express versions target only Metro in the upcoming Windows 8. On the Visual Studio Blog they have now stated that a version targeting the desktop will be made available as well. Nice to see Microsoft being reasonable and accepting that they cant push Metro down our throat in the current state. Developers have to be able to decide on our own, which environments we want to target. Now if they just fixed the all caps menus. LINQ and Rx for C from Microsoft submitted on 2012-06-05 Microsoft is developing libraries to add LINQ and Reactive Extensions to their C compiler. More information available on the Going Native show. If you are doing Windows only development with C, this can be a nice addition to your toolchest. Lots of nice C stuff submitted on 2012-06-03 If you are a bit bored on the weekend and feel like picking up speed about C11, C on Windows 8, or latest C freebies from Facebook, then there are lots of cool stuff to read about. The CNow 2012, former BoostCon, slides are now available. Video presentations will follow. If you can read German, there is a nice overview of the conference at heise . Microsoft has also made available the videos from the Developing Windows 8 Metro style apps with C conference. Regardless of your position on Microsofts latest moves in regard to Metro, C11, C/CX and Express editions, this videos are quite interesting to watch, and Metro is here to stay no matter what. So the best way is to improve a bit our knowledge about it. Facebook has released a new C library named Folly. Just have a look at it as it is full of nice stuff. A very good introduction to Monads with Clojure submitted on 2012-06-02 To keep on a Lisp note, there is a very good presentation from Carin Meier on InfoQ about the Identity, Maybe and State monads in Clojure. If you ever heard of Monads and still fight to grasp how they really work, this presentation is well worth one hour of your time. She blends the presentation with the Alice in Wonderland story, make it entertaining while learning. Deploying a Common Lisp web application submitted on 2012-05-17 Just found out a nice tutorial on how to deploy a web application to Heroku. Nice to know that Lisp is still having some visibility, maybe Clojure also helps a bit. Microsof is looking for compiler developers submitted on 2012-05-08 Herb Sutter just mentioned on his blog, that Microsoft is looking for engineers to join the Visual C team. You can find more information here . Good luck, in case you apply for the job. Do not rely on proprietary programming languages for your business. submitted on 2012-04-28 The idea for this post originated after I started following the Oracle vs Google Java litigation case, as well as, discussing about it on OSnews . I have started to realize, that while some of the mainstream languages provide quite nice abstractions and productivity, they are tainted with lack of freedom. Languages that are mainly brought to market by big companies, enjoy the benefit to quickly gather market share, have a big ecosystem around them, and have a better rate of supporting new features. But hidden in a dark corner of all this cosy ecosystems, lies a trap. All business decisions become hostage of the whims from the company selling the language. I have seen this happen too many times. Company X introduces a new programming language, eventually it gets adopted in the industry, later this company drops support for the programming language. All the companies that invested on the language are now stuck with a legacy language, where they have to invest a lot to find developers with the desired skill set, or to migrate their product to a newer programming language. So what seems to save development costs, and delivery time to the market, because language X is so great. Ends up costing a lot more when the owning company decides otherwise. Both options are costly. If a standard programming language had been used, the possibilities of having longer support would be greater, because thanks to the laws of the market several companies would be offering development environments for such languages. The best way to assure business independence from such scenarios, is to rely in programming languages with available ISO/ANSI standards, or open source ones. This way there is more confidence that the language will subsyst much longer than the proprietary ones, and the possibility of litigation regarding existing implementations will be minimal. Betting on the wrong horse submitted on 2012-04-08 While reading the Go tweeter feed Ive discovered a company called Wakoopa, decided to move their code from Ruby to C, after a failed attempt to use Go. As described on the company blog . Apparently they were disappointed with Gos GC performance and decided to move then to C instead. This is a typical example of hackers having a say on company business, instead of thinking what makes business sense. Gos GC will certanly get better, lets not forget that the language is only 2 years old, with version 1 released last week. And there are plenty of nice languages with runtimes making use of industrial strenght GC. Any of these languages would smoke Rubys performance. So the company decides to invest time and money recoding the said Ruby software two times. First to Go, then trying to understand what was going wrong with the new implementation, to finally recode it once again in C. All this would have been spared had they decide to use a more mature language. Dont take this blog entry as something against Go, as I think that the current GC problems will eventually be fixed, I just think it is an error to bet the company business in it for the time being and developers should use tools based on technical merit, not on what they like to use. In business you dont get many second chances. WebGL Stats Web Site submitted on 2012-04-05 I just discovered the WebGL Stats web site. Quite handy to know which WebGL are generaly available on most people computers. If you want to know more about WebGL, dont forget to visit the Learning WebGL blog. Two new C videos available on Channel 9 submitted on 2012-04-05 I just come across two C videos about modern C on Microsofts channel 9 web site. Even thought I dont agree 100 with everything Herb Sutter says on the first video, I have to agree that C is the best language to use nowadays for native performance. Maybe in some years, another language will take its place. But like C, it will stay around for many decades still. I would also like to wish an happy Easter for those of you celebrating it. New C programming article submitted on 2012-02-24 The other day I was reading some exercises the game studios do on their job interviews and decided to have my go at one of such exercises. It felt quite refreshing actually, since it has been a while I have done the type of low level memory management required by the exercise. The article together with a possible solution is available on the Compilers tutorials area. Sony is using C/.NET for PlayStation Suite/PS Vita submitted on 2011-12-28 Thanks to Monos Monologue feed, I just discovered that Sony is investing into C and. NET for their new PlayStation Suite and PS Vita platforms. I just did not like the comments about Javas GC in the third part, as it shows that the guy is not aware that the GC in most Java commercial JVMs are actually much more performant than what Mono or Microsoft have to offer. This is actually one area of improvement in the upcoming. NET 4.5. It will be interesting to watch how well this will be picked up by the game developer community, as this is a place where native development is still king. Currently XNA and jMonkeyEngine are mostly used by indies or for the toolsets. Having fun with Android submitted on 2011-10-25 Last weekend I have spent some time playing around with Android for a small demo, and it was very interesting. The platform has a few concepts that althought not new in the computing world, they are new in mainstream OS, like Intents for example. Where multiple applications cooperate by offering the capabilities to handle certain data types and in the end the application is actually a mashup of activities. Disappointment with what Microsoft is doing to C submitted on 2011-09-30 As many developers out there I was eagerly waiting for the BUILD conference and what changes it could bring to the C developers on Windows. It was nice to get to know the WinRT framework that will be part of the Windows 8, and the possible long term replacement of the Win32 apis. Another good side-effect from WinRT is that the Hungarian notation has gotten another death stab in the Windows platforms. What is not so good about it, is that Microsoft on their usual way, prefered to taint native C with their own C/CLI extensions instead of investing into a way of using standard C constructs with WinRT. It is a sad state of affairs, specially if you are old enough to remember how Borland was criticised for doing something similar with Borland C and later with C Builder. Another consequence is that Visual C 11 will bring almost zero new features in what concerns the new C11 standard, which has made many developers angry, as one can see in Visual C blog and channel9 comments. The only good thing is that at least Microsoft has made C development again a bit more visible in their developer tools roadmap. They should however take care with the availability of competing C compilers that take C and C standards compliance seriously. The return of native code submitted on 2011-08-25 A few weeks ago there was an article about the new C11 standard and the ressurgence of native code. I am slowly starting to share the same opinion as the article portrays. For a few years I have been hoping that the JVM and. Net based languages would reach the performance level of pure native languages. To a certain extent, the JIT offered by these languages are quite powefull, but still you can feel when using native applications or VM based ones. Javas write once, run anywhere has never been quite true, due to bugs across JVM implementations that force developers to write workarounds, when changing the JVM is not a solution. Net is mostly a Windows based VM even though Mono does provide support for part of it in another systems. Lately there has been a trend to put VMs on top of VMs. So we have a JVM/.Net based application that runs inside a VM emulating hardware in some cloud, and I see this as a waste of resources. We have multicore processors, with SIMD instructions and GPGPU, which are wasted by not being accessible to VM based languages. The access, when available, are usually via libraries and not provide the same access level that C and C allow. So even myself, have started to play around with native languages for my home projects. There are a still a few around Delphi, Free Pascal, Ada if you like Algol style. C, C, Objective-C, Go and D for C lovers and finally Haskell, Ocaml and Common Lisp for the funcional lovers. Maybe having native compiler implementations for Java or. Net languages could be a nice addition to the developers toolset. For Java we have GJC. but it seems to be abandoned since 2009, even thought it is still part of gcc. For. Net, Microsoft has created Bartok. maybe they could eventually make it part of the. Net SDK. Interesting times ahead. Mini-ML converted to F submitted on 2011-05-18 Back in 1997, I did a Mini-ML interpreter in Caml together with a very good friend of mine for the Programming Languages course, at the University. Years later I made the interpreter available here in Progtools. Due to my interest in F, I decided that porting the Mini-ML source code F would be a good exercise to learn about the differences between Caml/Ocaml and F. So now the Mini-ML is also available as a F based application. The experience was nice. It was a bit hard to me to find out all the differences, but in the end I got the interpreter code without any dependence on Ocaml migration support libraries. submitted on 2011-04-30 So I finally managed to live through the Ceylon presentation now available at InfoQ . Not sure what to think about this. They should just have bet on one of the existing languages that target the JVM, Scala, Clojure or Groovy. From the presentation I got the feeling that they have a bit of not invented here syndrome. As it is, I pretty much think that Ceylon is another language dead at birth. Specially since they have spent two years designing the language, and no compiler is still available. Personally my time is better invested in C/Go/D for native programming, Scala/Clojure for JVM or F for. Net. C Renaissance submitted on 2011-02-24 After bashing a bit on Microsoft on my last posts, here comes again a bit of praise. ) Just watched last evening the C Renaissance video in Channel 9. Again it is nice to see that Microsoft has noticed that native development still plays a big role, and that many developers would like to see a bit more of love for C in Microsofts tooling. Quite different from the lets go 100.Net speech from the early. Net 1.0 days. Nowadays both environments have their place in the IT world, it was just that C developers fellt negleted by Microsoft, now Microsoft is finally acknowleding that it needs to give more attention. It is nice to see C back into the game. Or as some people would say Back But I never went away. In praise of C and Linux submitted on 2011-02-17 The new London Stock Exchange software has finally gone live and is working without any major issue. The new system is written in C and runs on top of Linux. It replaced a. Net based solution that was giving lots of downtime problems to the London Stock Exchange. They are not the first to take such decision, the German stock exchange is also running on top of Linux. You can read about the complete story here. . For me this reveals a few issues. First of all, I imagine that maybe the. Net solution was not properly written, having seen quite a few monster architecture designs on my work life, that would be better with minimalist approaches. Whatever the reason behind such failure, it gave lots of bad press to Microsoft, and to the Accenture team responsible for creating the said application. I bet the team might not even be working for Accenture, knowing jobs work in UK. So as a Linux fan it was nice to see such turn of events. Another thing I noticed was that they decided to use C, instead of Java, which probably would make more sense if we look at the trends that see C as legacy. But as much as I like managed environments, they still cannot deliver the raw performance of C and C, or any other native language for that matter. After so many years of IT dating with managed enviroments, I imagine that people are now realizing that except for Web applications and low demanding response applications, native languages still win and will continue to do so. In a way this a Deja-vu von the late seventies where P-Code enviroments, Lisp based machines and Smalltalk VMs where all the rage. Eventually they faded out, only to be taken up again by Java and later. Net. I do program every day in Java and still like a lot the language, and lets be honest, it allows for very nice tools. But I am also having fun keeping my C skills up to date. Why Nokia Why submitted on 2011-02-12 So against all odds, Nokia did realy decide to make Windows Phone 7 the main OS for its mobiles. This is really a sad decision, Nokia is moving a way from a company that did quite some nice research work into one more OEM that just packs third party operating systems into their mobiles. I have become a bit pragmatic over the years, and dont hold a bias against Microsoft as I did on my early open source days, but history has shown that most companies that did a partnership with them, got burned somehow. I did work for Nokia, like any other company there were up and down moments, but it was a special company, and it is sad to see all the good people that still work there being put through this situation. Having been a Nokia employee and known how the company works, makes the think that Symbian and MeeGo are now dead. Sure the message that they are trying to give to the developers is not to abandon the platforms and belive in Nokia. But who can still believe in them Maemo was going to be replaced by MeeGo, while GTK based framework became legacy and Qt was the future. Similary the Symbian developers were told how easy they could bring their software to the platform thanks to Open C/C and Qt. Later on, the strategy changed in a way that everyone was told to develop with Qt, this way both MeeGo and Symbian platforms could be targeted, but there would still be place for Java, Flash and Python. Now a few months later, Nokia throws all these promisses out the window, and asks the developer community to belive in them, that 150 milion Symbian headsets are still planned to be sold and the platform will still be somehow around. Problem is, I bet most hobby developers are just going to go away. The desilusion with out things turned out is just too big. And I fear that in a few years Nokia will just be known as Microsoft Mobiles, and what we are seeing today will be a use case in many management courses. The only winner in this case will be Microsoft, they get Nokia to ship Windows Phone 7 based mobiles and thanks to their market size, finally manage to get a visible mobile platform, which many developers decided to ignore until this deal took place. My thoughts are with the Nokia employees that gave so much for the internal development and will now be severely affected with this decision. STL C tutorials at MSDN submitted on 2011-01-30 Stephan T. Lavavej from Microsoft Visual C Libraries team has made a series of tutorials about how to use the STL, which are quite interesting. Some of the tutorials already make use of C0x features, showing how modern proper C can be really made to look like. Just go to MSDN page to have a look on the tutorials. A little warning, the videos make use of Silverlight, which might be a problem if you dont like this sort of browser plugins, but the sessions contents are really worth installing it. Enjoy the sessions. Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) has been announced submitted on 2010-12-06 The new features of the upcoming Android 2.3 are now public. Just go over to the Android release announment to know more about it. One of the more interessing features is the ability now to fully develop in native code, plus the possibility to use STL with C. I am looking forward for a possible 2.3 upgrade, in case HTC makes it available. Haskell has a redesigned web site submitted on 2010-12-02 The Haskell official web site has now a new design. You can check the new design here . What I like about the new design is that it makes the information more attractive. It should not matter for a programming language, but sometimes it does. For some users this is the type of small change that keeps them reading the available information on the web site or jump somewhere else. I really enjoy the increase in visibility that funcional programming in now starting to have in the industry and having Haskell to be amog the chosen ones is really great. Space Architects submitted on 2010-11-29 Some videos of Oredev 2010 are now available . One of the best videos to watch is the one from Jim Webber about doing 1 billion transactions per month in Java HTTP. One of the best parts of the talk is how Jim critics the SOA enterprise architectures that only lead to complexity and layers and layers of nonsense. This is actually my opinion on SOA, for me it is a nice way of selling consulting services. There are lots of ways of doing similar architectures, without the Gigabyte stack of software required to do SOA. Microsoft open sources F submitted on 2010-11-05 Microsoft just announced that they made the source code for the F compiler available under the Apache 2.0 License. The has been reported by Don Syme on his blog . I really think it is important what Microsoft is doing by briging the functional progamming to the mainstream. Thanks to Microsoft, we have now some people in the enterprise using a functional programming language, and lets not forget that some of the main Haskell researchers do work at Microsoft research. If you like to learn more about functional programming and have to develop applications in. Net, maybe now is the time to have a look at F. Apple deprecates Java on MacOS X submitted on 2010-10-22 Apple just decided to stop investing on Java for newer MacOS X releases, as stated on their release notes of MacOS X 10.6 Update 3 and MacOS X 10.5 Update 8. Since until now Apple always developed their own JVM, which they have licensed from Sun, it is now an open question what will Java developers on the Mac platform do. Will they rely on a custom build of the OpenJDK, or will Oracle step in and also provide a JDK for MacOS X like they do for other platforms Now I am really happy that I havent bought a Mac so far. This news coupled with the Apples idea of having an App Store for MacOS X, only shows how the computing world can become if Apple was in charge. Now even Microsoft is looking a very nice guy. For more information about the news just check Slashdot or InfoQ . So it is now it is clear to me, that most likely I wont ever get a Mac. Quite a few updates from the C world submitted on 2010-10-09 Many people deslike C, even I have a love/hate relationship with it, but I also think that there is no other mainstream language that can replace it for the time being. Sure it is a complex language, which requires some years to get the C Jedi Master level, but it also allows a level of multi-paradigm programming flexibility and performance, that few languages offer. So with this in mind, there are a few ways for you to refresh your C knowledge. The first one is the video that is now available from the Bjarne Stroustrupss roadshow . The othe information is the set of video tutorials created by Stephan T. Lavavej from the Microsoft Visual C team. They provide a nice overview over the STL capabilities, and you can find them here . If you feel like playing around with the upcoming features of C0x, you can get yourself a copy of GNU GNU gcc 4.5.0 or the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express . What Killed Smalltalk Could Kill Ruby, Too submitted on 2010-10-01 I just discovered a very interesting video from the RailsConf 09, discussing the reasons that kept Smalltalk out of the enterprise and how they could happen again with Ruby. The presentation is available here and is very amusing to watch. Even though I lean towards Python in the dynamic languages world, I would like that Ruby also stays around. ) HTC Desire arrived Sorry for the downtime submitted on 2010-09-25 First of all, let me excuse myself for the downtime on the last days. I had a problem with the domain, which made the site inaccessible. On a positive note, my HTC Desire just arrived and I am now exploring its capabilities, stay tuned for more information. HTC Desire on its way submitted on 2010-09-25 So I finally decided to order my Android based mobile, and ended up chosing a HTC Desire. It ships with the Android 2.1 version, but I know that it can be upgraded to the 2.2 version, which I will surely do. Then it will be the time to start exploring the device capabilities and toying with the idea of developing some applications. For a Linux fan like myself, the big plus will be the ability to carry Linux on my pocket as well. Who would say that the small Unix clone from the early 90s would be in the heart of so many mobile phones Symbian is still not developer friendly enough submitted on 2010-08-27 This week I decided to try to use the new Nokia Qt SDK and check how friendly it is now to develop for Symbian. I was really hoping that now with Qt, I could finally have some fun developing for Symbian mobiles. Boy was I wrong While trying to install the Qt libraries into the mobile, I get a simple Error -14 message. Very user friendly I even tried to ask the forum, but none of the advices did help. I am now left with the possibility of going through the trouble of installing OpenC, Qt manually and hope it works. But then again, it might not be worth it, because only applications for the N97 Mini and the X6 are accepted in the Ovi Store, as Nokia says on their site. They say another devices are going to be supported, but if I remember what they did to N-Gage users, the support will never come. So Im done with Symbian. Even with the recent Oracle/Google issue going on, my next mobile is going to be most likely an Android one. Why Oracle. Why Oracle submitted on 2010-08-14 It had to happen sonner or later. So the last Oracles move concerning Javas future was to process Google over Java patents on their Dalvik VM. As you can now read all over the Internet. When Sun did it to Microsoft a few years ago, it made sense. Microsoft was developing their own non standard Java implementation, while extending it to be Windows only, thus breaking the write once, run anywhere marketing campaign. So Suns move did make sense as a way to keep the language and runtime compatible across implementations. When Google released Dalvik, this same discussion came back again, but somehow Sun seemed to be happy with it. Google was maintaining Java the language, while providing another runtime environment. Plus they were very carefull not to refer to it as a Java implementation. But apparently Sun was not that happy about it, and their financial situation was the only thing preventing them to be more active against Google. New reports about this case, seem to imply that this possibility was discussed during Suns sale. The problem is that Google is not Microsoft. On those days the programming community was on Suns side, because Microsoft was seen as the bad guy. On the other hand Google is still a hero on the eyes of the majority of the open source community and Oracle is not Sun. Regardless how this case ends up to be, most likely Oracle has just killed Java. Sure there are millions of lines of code being written in Java every day. It is also my main programming language, at least for the time being. But Java was already loosing its appeal as programming language, now thanks to Oracle, many developers will desdain the language for political reasons as well. On a side note, it seems Oracle has killed OpenSolaris development as well. It only goes to show how bad it was for Sun products to be bought by Oracle. On the long run they will alianate everyone that still had a positive remark about Java or Solaris. No Go for Go submitted on 2010-08-01 I have been playing around with the latest programming language, whose development is sponsorend by Google, Go . The language is a nice evolution from C, and might be able to replace it as the next language to use for systems programming. It provides some nice concepts to help developing multicore applications, like message channels and go routines. It is also a type safe language, with garbage collection, type inference and interface programming. But I am not sure that the language is going to get widespread use if their developers dont provide features that we have got used to have available in other languages. I speak namely of enumerations, generics, dynamic linking, dynamic loading and exceptions. Most of the Go users seem to be against having these features available in Go, with the argument that they would render the language too complex. I think that without supporting what every mainstream language already provides, Go will be just another language. Unless due to Googles influence it happens to get a broad userbase. Me personally I will follow every now and then how the language evolves, but I think my time is better spent with F/Scala/Haskell. Google releases App Inventor for Android submitted on 2010-07-13 If you are old enough you might remeber a nice point-and-click development environment for Macintosh called Hypercard. This way of developing applications has been the foundation of a few RAD environments like Visual Basic or Delphi. Now it has come to the Android world, allowing several people to acquire a bit of task what programming is all about. You can read more about it at the official web site . Another piece of information that is also quite nice to know, is that they make use of Scheme environment for the JVM, as their solution to generate and compile the visual code. Java 7 closures syntax is awfull submitted on 2010-06-03 The first version of the upcoming closure functionality for Java 7 has just been made available on the OpenJDK repositories. You can read more about it on this InfoQ article . But has you can see, the proposed syntax is really bad. I cannot understand how come they have choosen such an awfull way to declare closures. Any other language with such a feature has better syntax than what is being proposed for Java. As you can see from another InfoQ article. most people are not that happy with the current decision. I used to be a Java fan, and I use it everyday on my work, but with the way that generics were introduced and now this awfull syntax for dealing with closures in the language, they (Sun/Oracle) are killing the language. I just hope that they get some common sense before the final syntax gets decided. Intel releases Intel Concurrent Collections for Haskell submitted on 2010-05-30 Intel just made a big step in increasing Haskells visibility in the industry, by releasing the first version of their concurrent libraries for Haskell. Now available at Intels Blog . Haskell programmers around the world, rejoice Functional programming is slowly becoming mainstream. Modern OpenGL tutorial submitted on 2010-04-21 Joe Groff from Durian Software has posted an online tutorial explaining how to make use of modern OpenGL programming techniques. You can have a look at it here Have fun updating your OpenGL skills. submitted on 2010-03-30 As some of you might recall, I had mixed feelings for the Linux support provided by Sony on their PS3 games console. Their lack of support for something similar to the PS2 Linux always kept me away from buying a PS3. Now they have done me a favour. I will never buy a PS3, after their decision to remove support for Linux from the older PS3 version, as reported by Slashdot and OSNews web sites. Even if you dont like Linux, this is an attack to consumers. When you buy a product, you buy it for a specific set of funcionalities. How can a company dare to come back, after they got your money, and say that will remove one feature from something that is suppoesed to be yours I for one, will stay away from Sony game related products from now on. Now getting a XBox 360 is really getting appeling, regardless of how you see Microsoft, they care much more about consumers. Finally OpenGL 3.2 on my laptop thanks to NVidia submitted on 2010-01-13 It has been a long time since my last post. So before I say anything else, have a very nice 2010 full of only good things in life and in all areas of your life better as 2009 was. I am using my first 2010s post to say a big thank you to NVidia. I think I own them this much because I am always complaining about their love/hate relationship with OpenGL. On one side, they are one of the big players in the Khronos Group pushing for the new versions of the OpenGL standard, but on the other hand many of their freely available tools dont provide proper OpenGL/GLSL/OpenCL support. Which always leaves indie developers and hobbists like me to wonder how commited they really are. But yesterday I got something nice from NVidia. Thanks to their new NVidia Verde program it is now possible to update laptop drivers, instead of being forced to fight with the laptop manufactuer to provide them. The first time I tried to update my drivers, the laptop was still not supported by the program and I gave my feedback, and I guess many other users. So yesterday it was a pleasant surprise not only to find that it was possible to update to a newer version, but that now I can also properly play around with OpenGL 3.2 and OpenCL 1.0 on my laptop. So many thanks to NVidia, and I hope that they continue they good work supporting OpenGL and developers on the move like myself. GDC Europe 2009 submitted on 2009-08-19 This week I was attending the GDC Europe 2009, that took place in Cologne. It used to take place in Leipzig, but now the event organizers have move it to Cologne. Since it is just 60Km away from Dusseldorf, I had to attend it as well. This was my second time attending the conference, the first being back in 2003 at Earls Court in London. I must say that comparing both conferences, the one in London was better organized in terms of Lectures. This time I attended a few ones lacking content and sounding more to marketing sessions than anything else. Still I did manage to learn a few things along the conference and even talked to a few people. The Keynote sessions were all quite interesting. Today I also managed to see live one of the best game designers out there, Peter Molyneux. A few trends that I observed during the conference. C seems to have settled as the election language for tool development. OpenGL is pretty much dead in what concerns the Windows platform. Most Studios will only care about OpenGL on the platforms where it is the oficial graphics API, like the iPhone or the PS3. Which is kind of sad, but understandable if we take into consideration all the issues around game development. Since many attendees were Americans, there were lots of iPhones and Blackberries going around. On the mobile development front iPhone is getting all the attention. The new Crytech engine is just great. I saw two live demos of it and both were quite amazing. Finally, there were quite a few attendees carrying Macs around, but a few of them were actually running Windows Oh I am eagerly waiting for Larrabee to be fully disclosed, but we still need to await around one year. OpenGL 3.2 got released submitted on 2009-08-06 Great news, even though I came a bit late to write about them. The Khronos group has announced on Monday the new revision of the OpenGL standard . I really have to congratulate them. Besides all the negative press that they got around the OpenGL 3.0 release, they have been doing a good job after that and the industry has been a good supporter. Assuming it keeps going like this, we may still have a future for OpenGL. Together with the announcement, they have also made available a nice reference card . On Windows, DirectX might have woon the number one position as the main API, but OpenGL keeps on leaving as the only portable 3D API that there is currently available. I have a love/hate relationship with Microsoft products, and having OpenGL around is also a nice way to force improvements to products coming out of Redmond. Since we are still talking about OpenGL related stuff, just have a look at recent OpenCL video published by AMD. Concepts dropped from C0x submitted on 2009-07-23 Today is a sad day for the C community, as the news about Concepts being dropped from the upcoming standard got known. The best way to get yourself informed about it, is to read the Bjarnes article at Doctor Dobbs Journal. It is pity that a feature, which could improve C error messages got dropped like that. I do however understand the reasoning behind, specially due to the fact of it being a commitee feature without real life experience. The exception specifications and external templates features already showned us that is not a good idea. On top of that, it is now visible that C0x will become C1x, since there is still too much work to finish, before the first compilers can be fully compliant with the standard. Would this be a good signal for a new systems language to appear Who knows, but for the time being C has still its place on the industry. Article: Interviewing Java Developers With Tears in My Eyes submitted on 2009-07-21 Nice article about interviewing developers that dont get anything about their real job. While you might not agree with the article, it is true that many supposed developers are only doing configuration file programming and lack many skills you would expect from a developer. This is specially true with people working in the industry without a proper CS background, and because of that complain that somethings are too complex. Although it is true that many programming tasks could be simplified, people should know how to use their tools of trade, and more important, why they work as they do. Presentations from Nokia Developer Summit 2009 now online submitted on 2009-05-26 Nokia has put the presentations from the latest Nokia Developer Summit online. And I already went through them, and have found what seems to be a hidden message. Nokia seems to be promoting the use of language runtimes, meaning Java, Flex, Python and Widgets as a way to easily write applications. And for C developers the rote seems to be related to QT for mobiles. For me this clearly shows that Nokia might be receiving lots of negative feedback when comparing the pain of using Symbian C with the development process to the iPhone, Android or Linux based mobiles. So I for one applaud their effort to ease our lives as developers, just dont know if they will come on time to fight the advance of the other platforms, specially the Apple based ones. 2009 Lang. NET Symposium Videos submitted on 2009-04-25 Uff It has been already a month since my last update, I really need to try be more active. Lately I have been watching the videos from the latest Lang. NET Symposium. Most of them are quite interesting. Regardless of what you might think about Microsoft, I see as a good think that they push people to research managed languages. And the conference even had quite a few speakers doing JVM related work. I just did not like the talk about dropping C/C in favour of C for doing Linux development. I think that the speaker really does not understand what is behind Linux. If Microsoft makes the full. Net stack available as a ECMA standard, without patents, then we might have some reason, but that is all. Remember that you will need Silverlight to watch the videos. OpenGL 3.1 Specification got released submitted on 2009-03-24 Today at GDC 2009, Khronos announced the new specification for OpenGL. This is really good news. After the desilusion that many of us had with the 3.0 specification, I can say that I am really impressed with what they managed to deliver in 6 months. NVidia has already made 3.1 compliant drivers available If Khronos keeps with the current rhythm, the OpenGL fans dont need to be scared of OpenGL fading away. Lets hope that is the case, the world really needs a nice portable 3D API. Getting ready to release an updated site version submitted on 2009-03-22 I am playing around with PHP and jQuery in order to update the remaining parts of the site that still look a bit too ugly and have the old look. It is improving quite well and Ill be able to release this updated version in the next few days. jQuery really rocks. submitted on 2009-02-07 I am attending for the first time FOSDEM. So far it has been quite interesting to see what the morning talks were talking about the Open Source community spirit. On the afternoon I am planning to attend talks about GNUStep, XWindows and Graphics programming in Java. I will later post some informations about how those talks went. Update: Here goes a small update, now that the first day has ended. I ended up attending the following conferences: New theme engine in GNUStep Changes introduced in XRanR What has happened on Nouveaus development Accelerating embeded Java with OpenGL ES Increasing Java 2D performance with XRender From all talks, what I enjoyed most was the X development related ones. The other ones were a bit dry. But one thing I already learned, X talks have a lot of interested people, one really needs to arrive early, otherwise there one stays outside. I also enjoyed the projects that were showing something on their booths. More on that when I return to Dusseldorf. Getting a proper development enviroment for F submitted on 2009-01-29 If you want to play around with F but do not want to be left with just the command line compiler and a text editor, there is a solution. In case you dont own the Microsoft Visual Studio, there is the possibility to install just the running part of the IDE. The F installer will then use it as the normal Visual Studio. You should do the following steps: Download the Microsoft Visual Studio Shell, integrated mode Run the installation. This will only unpack the real installation, so you need to execute it again. Now install F You will have now a Visual Studio installation, with support for F Happy coding with F. ) submitted on 2009-01-16 I just installed Windows 7 on my laptop and I am quite impressed with it. Vista does not support it that well, but with Windows 7, even though it is a Beta, thus slower and heavier than a release build, it is lighter than XP. The only negative thing so far, seems to be that the fan is working more than with XP, but that might be because of Aero using DirectX, making the graphics card work more, or some driver problem. Either way it is the first public beta, so we cannot ask for perfection. From this first experience, I am looking forward for the final release and will continue to play with it. I guess I am being atracted to the dark side of the force. ) Orion Tear submitted on 2009-01-05 While I was in vacations in Portugal, I saw a program about Orion Tear. a portuguese 3D movie made with open source tools. It was made by Rogerio Perdiz, with help of Blender. Gimp and Inkscape . It is very interesting to see how far he managed to go with these tools, a very good example that others can follow to try to get a footstep into the industry. State of Linux game development submitted on 2009-01-02 Because of Jeffs blog entry about how important it is for the game studios to support Mac OSX and Linux, I have found out a blog discussing the state of affairs of Linux game development . Jonathan Blow is unfortunely right about the state of affairs, and I guess it is the main reason why many game developers stay away from the platform. Another problem is the type of answer one does get sometimes. Even Jonathan complains about it. Nowadays there are lots of teenagers full of anger against anything besides Linux and dont have any idea what real developer tools look like. Anyway we are at the begining of a new year and we can hope that the situation will improve. Happy 2009 xubuntu disappoints on old laptop submitted on 2008-12-28 My father has an old Toshiba 4070 CDT laptop, with 192 MB RAM and a Celeron 300 Mhz processor. A perfect candidate to use a Linux distribution and thus improve its current usage. Since it is already an adventure to run Windows 2000 plus an anti-virus on the system. So I have settled on Xubuntu as Linux distribution, because most of the provided software is correctly translated into European Portuguese, and it uses XFCE as desktop environment. It seemed a good choice, but it was not. I am not able to configure X with more than 800x600 resolution, and network still does not work. A friend of mine is having similar problems with the latest Ubuntu. I still might try with PuppyLinux or with Slackware, but I am not willing to spend that much time with it. No Closures on Java 7 submitted on 2008-12-13 It has been confirmed at this years Devoxx08 that closures wont be part of Java 7. As presented by Mark Reinhold . I am disappointed, so Java will be one of the few mainstream languages not supporting closures. Maybe we are able to get them on Java 8. Luckly Sun is now backing another languages on the JVM, so at least we are able to be productive with Scala, Groovy, Jython and JRuby on the JVM. I really dont understand these sort of programmers that fear closures, for me they seem like people that only understand Java, and are average programmers. Based on my experience, any programmer with a proper CS curriculum will have full understanding of closures and their benefits. Maybe the problem is that many universities are now producing dumb programmers OpenCL 1.0 specification is out submitted on 2008-12-08 The specification for the OpenCL has been announced today on SC08. You can get all the information on the Khronos web site Lets hope that the graphic card manufacturers get OpenCL aware drivers, released quite soon. Linux almost back to my Laptop submitted on 2008-12-07 This week I have decided to buy an extra harddrive and play around with the idea of having Linux installed into it. It was not easy task. I had to play around with a few distributions, but in the end I managed to find one that almost worked with everything. I started with the latest Fedora, Fedora Core 10 . which was a very big disappointment. The distribution seems to have a few new interesting features. However it never managed to recognized my network. Something that all other distributions never failed to do. Besides it has some strange behaviours where the CPU has a 100 load most of the time. At first I thought it might be a problem with the KDE version, so I ended up resinstalling the GNOME one, just to experience the same results. Then I was using the Mandriva ONE 2006 live CD, just to help me download the new 2009 ISO. Which did not work because any of the available browsers were able to keep up with the download, thus making it an impossible task. Luckly I also have a Knoppix CD, so with it I was able to download the Mandriva ONE 2009 ISO, and burn it. The Mandriva distribution is really nice, and to my liking is still one of the best desktop distributions around. And amazingly it is the first time, all my laptop special buttons worked out of the box. Still I am writting this post from my XP installation, because even though I was able to run Mandriva almost without problems, there were still a few that prevented it from being my main OS. My laptop fans have thermostat and only work when it is really hot, or the CPU is having some hard work. With all tried distributions, even Mandriva, my fans kept working at full speed, and lmsensors does not recognize my motherboard. Using libdvdcss I was able to watch DVDs, but without sound, which does not help that much. Finally, I do use Windows Media Player a lot, because as someone living abroad, I really enjoy the ability to see some TV or radio shows, on the web. The main problem is that currently many of these senders are using WMP 11 codecs, which are not properly supported by Win32Codecs package. The other solution would be to use the Fluendo codecs, but I still need to think if I really want to pay for something that I get for free on Windows and MacOSX. So, until I can sort out these problems, I am back to XP. submitted on 2008-11-23 I went yesterday with two friends to Frankfurt, where we had the opportunity to enjoy a very nice concert from Orishas. They have put up a nice show, and all the bands acting before them, were also very good to hear. Only Stereo MCs seemed to be a bit out of place for the Orishas type of public. Still they have also given a good show. Sony and PS3 Linux submitted on 2008-11-09 I did complain already a few times about what Sony is allowing Linux to do on the Playstation 3. As you might recall from previous postings, or by reading around the Web, Sony does not allow access to the RSX chip, thus preventing Linux to make use of accelerated 3D graphics. There are a few people from the Homebrew community trying to get around the Hypervisor, and there is also a Mesa driver that does software rendering using the Cell processors. Both solutions help alleviate the problem, but that dont make it go away. But lately I have started wondering if the community isnt the one to blame for such state of affairs. If you go to the former Playstation 2 Linux Web site. you will see most people are worried to use the PS2 as a router, mini-server, or a plain desktop. What wont you see, is too many discussions regarding game development on the PS2 Linux. So was this deviation from the PS2 main goal, that made Sony think that it isnt worth to give Linux access to the RSX chip Meeting an old friend submitted on 2008-10-26 Sometimes life is really surprising. This weekend I did not had big plans except for something going on, on Saturday, but even that was kind of changed on the last minute. Then, I met a friend by chance on the tram, and thanks to her, Ive found out that a mutual friend would be in town. Someone that I havent met since 2006 and is now in Germany for some trainings. So in the end, we ended up meeting, and talked about what each of us has been doing on these last two years and life in general. It was really great. I wish all surprises in life could be that good. New Apple Laptops Or not. ( submitted on 2008-10-16 Apple has released this Tuesday a new set of laptops, and they are really beatiful to look at. However it is still not this time that I will get one. My 17 inches laptop is still in great shape and it was 1000 euros cheaper than the 17 inches MacBook Pro. The only thing the Apple laptop has going for it, is a dual core processor. Even my graphics card, a GeForce 6800, has more internal memory. So if what you care about is graphics programming, better stay with a PC, at least until Apple starts to offer more options. Oh And did I mention that they do not support Firewire anymore submitted on 2008-09-27 Cla are one of my favorite Portuguese bands. Yesterday I had the opportunity to see them alive after several years of absence from their concerts. What can I say They continue as great as always I wish that they still have a long life ahead of them as band. submitted on 2008-09-15 Last week, during my vacations, I was able to attend the Theatre festival FADA in Aveiro, Portugal. It was really nice to watch all the Theatre groups that attended the festival. I hope that my hometown gets to see more of such events. If you happen to live in Aveiro, I can only advise you to keep watching for the next ones. Sun Certified Java Programmer submitted on 2008-08-27 So, now I am a certified Java developer as well I think that the value our industry gives to certifications is a bit overheighted, but they play a major role nontheless, so I decided that it was time to get certified. Now I have free time again to dedicate to jME :) Carmacks comments on Linux gamming submitted on 2008-08-17 John Carmack has commented his view on the Linux gamming, on the last Quakecon convention. You can read his comments on the Linux Gamming site . His is kind of right. What many people on the Linux community dont understand is that supporting portable APIs is not enough. On commercial titles there is a whole set of support to expect that Linux just dont have. Windows, with all its problems, is still more manageable than Linux in what concerns managing to run a game sucessfuly. Many people moved from PCs to consoles because you just need to plug a disc to play the game, without further configuration problems. I cant image tech support telling normal users to change configuration scripts under /etc to make their game able to run on a given distribution. Sadly I have to agree with John. OpenGL 3.0 Is here, kind of. submitted on 2008-08-16 Last monday, it has finally communicated to the community, the new OpenGL 3.0 standard. However it ended up being more like a OpenGL 2.2 than what has been promissed to the community. As a result, the OpenGL forums exploded with complaints that people would drop support for OpenGL and that the CAD companies are to blame for what happened. Now the sentiments seem to have settled down a bit, and the SIGGRAPHs BOF also helped to calm down the people. Lets see what the future holds for OpenGL. Me personally, as a Linux fan, I would like to see that OpenGL as a relevant multiplatform API. But I see the danger of OpenGL going to join PHIGS, Glide, among others, on the 3D API heaven, if Khronos doesnt fulfill their promisse regarding the 6 months delivery for OpenGL 3.1. Love Parade: The Good, Bad and Ugly submitted on 2008-07-19 Yesterday it was time to go for my first time to the Love Parade. It was great I already went to another Parade like events, specially while living in Switzerland, but this was the first time at the real one. I did meet a few nice people and enjoyed most of it. That was the good part of the whole day. The bad part was having to endure the rain that was falling every now and then, spoiling a bit the fun that we would otherwise have if it was a shinny day. I decided to leave the ugly part to the end. The ugly part was having to go thru four police control points that were simply not prepared for the amount of people that came to the Love Parade. There were people faiting, having bruises and it was very unpleasant to move between check points. Had the police left the people to walk on their on to the train station, everything would have gone a way lot better. At least that is my gut feeling. SCRUM applied to game development submitted on 2008-07-18 There is a nice article in Gamasutra about the Top 10 pitfalls Using Scrumm. while applying it to the game development process. Java Monkey Engine site renewed submitted on 2008-06-02 I have been tracking the Java Monkey Engine project for quite sometime. Unfortunely on the last months, not much care has been taken for the site. Leaving many visitors to wonder if the project was still alive. The project sure was, and is, alive The thing was, that time is a limited quantity and priority has given to some other tasks. But now the site has goten a clean face that really shows the framework is alive and waiting for you to try it out. Picking on XNA as well, I think that XNA and Java Monkey Engine, are two good examples for frameworks, which can be used to produce cool games. Not all games need to be the next Crysis. XNA 3.0 CTP is out submitted on 2008-05-20 Finally the new XNA for Visual Studio 2008 is available. This is only the technical preview, the final version should be made available at the begining of the Summer time. At the same time, the Creators Club Online has been updated for the online community, the so called You Tube for Games . Independent of my position regarding what Microsoft does and their business practices, I find XNA a very good tool. It allows many students and bedroom coders to do something that might give them an entry point into the Game Industry. Sure they can still do it with C, C, Java and whatever toolkit they like. But XNA provides an infrastructure that helps them into the right direction and for the good or bad, some important companies are starting to give an important look to XNA. Me personally would like that the Java Monkey Engine would be something similar to XNA. But while Sun doesnt have a clear picture what to do with Java3D, JOGL and other similar graphics projects, Microsoft does have a clear goal. When they realize what they should do, most game developers will be happily developing with XNA. I know that at least I will play at little with it. Spain is looking for Engineers submitted on 2008-05-06 It seems that Spain is lacking 25 000 Engineers, according to El Pais. If you fancy working in Spain, now might be the time to look for an opportunity. Portugals Usage Manual submitted on 2008-04-23 Recently I have bought the book Gebrauchsanweisung fur Portugal . Sorry for not providing a direct URL but PHPs simplexml() seems to have problems with the Amazon URL. Anyway back to the book. The book was written by a German that lived for some time in Portugal and it is really cool It contains a few sterotypes and some exageration sometimes, but it is overall funny, and I as a Portuguese really had a laugh while reading it. So if you know German, I advise you to read it, specially if you are Portuguese. Spieleentwickler Treffen NRW submitted on 2008-04-04 Yesterday, I attended the 4th Spieleentwickler Treffen NRW at the Media Design Hochschuele. here in Dusseldorf. It was very nice, with lots of interesting persons full of desire to make fun games. I also enjoyed the presentations that were done. Im already thinking about attending the next one. ) Back from vacations submitted on 2008-03-30 I am finally back to Dusseldorf after some vacations where I travelled to Vienna, Amersfoot and Amesterdam. You might think that this was a lot of travelling around, but actually when one lives on the middle of Europe it is kind of easy to travell around like that. Vienna was really nice. My last time there was back in 2003, and now I had a bit more time to get to know the city. We really found lots of nice places and the Austrian gastronomy is also very tasty. ) Amersfoot was then the opportunity to meet some of my friends on a new stage of their life. The city seems very welcoming. And we also took the oportunity to spend a day in Amesterdam because both cities are quite close to each other. And in Netherlands I also got the opportunity to taste new gastronomy trends. Also very nice. ) Now it is time to get back to work. New Site Design submitted on 2008-03-03 Finally after several years with the same design, I have decided to refresh the way the site looks. Thanks to owsd I could quickly change it. I might still change the template but I also like this one. This is work in progress, currently only the blog page has the new layout. I will update the rest during this week or on the next weekend. NVidias GDC 2008 Papers are now Available submitted on 2008-03-01 For those of you that arent always tracking down all the comunications from our beloved graphics hardware developers, NVidia has just published the papers from their talks at GDC 2008. You can get them here . And the best of all is that they are all in PDF format. ) submitted on 2008-02-24 The slides from the 2008 Lang. NET Symposium are now available. The downside is that you need to install Silverlight in order to see them. I really would like that Microsoft would be more standards friendly instead of having their own standards for everything. Anyway, if you can overcome the prejudice of having to have Silverlight installed, the talks are quite interesting. Super Concert submitted on 2008-02-19 Yesterday I went to the Phoneheads concert together with the Dusseldorfs Orchestra. That was a really nice concert In case you dont know them, the Phoneheads are a Drum and Bass band from Dusseldorf. It was very enjoyable to see how they were able to mix their music with classic music. Microsofts Channel 9 submitted on 2008-02-18 This weekend I spent a great deal of time watching Channel 9 videos. Surely you get a lot of Microsoft propaganda, but they also have very interesting subjects with developers/researchers working outside Microsoft world. So even if Microsoft technologies arent your cup of tea, Channel 9 might be worth a look. Portuguese Game Studio on the News submitted on 2008-02-11 I just saw an article at the Develop Magazine about a Portuguese studio using the Gamebryo engine. The Portuguese game studio is called Biodroid. and they seem to have on their plans a game for the Wii. As a side note, Reuters will use Java for their Real Time Systems. Helau Carnaval is in Town submitted on 2008-02-02 Hi Currently we are in Carnaval, and it is pretty big here in Germany. So we are having lots of partys to attend to. ) On a side note, I have found that the videos from the last Ruby conference are online. and even though I tend to lean more to the Python side, Ive been watching the conference videos. There is pretty cool stuff to watch. Even if you dont intend to develop applications in Ruby, I advice you to take a look at the videos. You can always learn something new. Software Engineering Podcasts submitted on 2008-01-22 Hi So the year already goes far advanced for my first 2008 entry, but since we are still in January. Happy New Year. ) Now for the blog entry subject. If you are into software development, I have found out a very nice site with podcasts about software development. It is called the Software Engineering Radio . Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year submitted on 2007-12-26 Even though Im posting this entry after Christmas day, we are still on Christmas Hollidays. So enjoy the season and all the best for 2008 Portuguese Winner on the NVidia Shader Contest submitted on 2007-12-09 I just discovered that one of the winners from the Shade Your World competition is Portuguese Bye Symbian C submitted on 2007-11-26 You guys might remember how happy I was last year with the possibilty of trying out C on Symbian mobiles. After some experiments, like a tic-tac-toe game and some OpenGL/ES examples, I failed to find the platform as interessant as I was expecting. First of all, one has to program on a weird C dialect, full of concepts like Two phase initialization . functions that can leave and lack of full ISO-C support. And STL is also missing. The reasoning for many of the design decisions behind Symbian-C is due to the hardware constraints of the devices where SymbianOS used to run. However the latest handsets are more powefull that my first PCs (386-gtPentium), so I dont see why I have to use a weaker version of C than I had to use on those days. And at least on my handset, the J2ME performance is quite good. So Im giving up on Symbian-C until it gets more programmer friendly or I get paid to endure its pains. A little Ruby submitted on 2007-11-19 Due to the increased interest in the Ruby programming language, I took some time to play with the language during a business travel last week. The language really looks quite nice, and I specially like the Smalltalk feel that one can see on the language itself. However I dont see myself making a huge investment into taking Ruby into use. And the main reason for it is that I have been using Python for quite some time now. Besides code blocks, I dont see many advantages of Ruby over Python. Sure I might use it the future, if the need arises. But for the time being, Python serves my dynamic language programming requirements, specially due to the wider support it has. The increase in functional programming submitted on 2007-11-11 Last week I came to know a little know fact that pleased me. Microsoft is turning F into a product, as noticed in Don Symes blog. For those of you that dont know iti, F is a funcional language for. Net based on the ML familly of languages. Ive always been a great fan of funcional programming, having had my first contact with Caml Light. One of the things that attracted me to Python was the functional programming possibilities that the language somehow offered at the time. Python and Ruby offer many funcional based contructs and they somehow helped more people to become more aware of funcional programming. Haskell keeps on attracting users and since Pugs makes use of it, it gained a bit more of traction. Not to forget that one of the research institutes using the language it Microsoft Research itself. Now having a big company like Microsoft backing a functional language in their official set of programming languages will only help the cause, regardless of one may think about the company itself. I for one, am not a super fan of Microsoft, but I am glad that they are productizing F and will for sure have a look at the language. Who knows maybe functional programming might be the next breakthrough in the industry, after OOP. ) C0x, will anyone care submitted on 2007-10-20 I started programming in C, back in 1992. At the time there were lots of C related magazines discussing the language along with the standardization process. The C Report and The C/C Users Journal became part of my monthly reading. Since then I became well versed in the language and even had the oportunity to use it in HPC scenarios, during my stay at CERN . But currently I spend most of my working time with managed languages (Java, Python, etc), and only code in C when need arises. I only use C for personal projects, or when it is the best tool for a given job. Otherwise I stay on the cosy world of higher level languages as C. ) But I try to keep me up to date with the C language revision, and some of the changes, like concepts, which appeal to me. However I am a bit sceptisc that the world will notice C0x when it comes out. We are in 2007 and as far as I know, there isnt a single C compiler that fully implements the Ansi C 98. Assuming that C0x will be C 09, when will the first 100 compliant compiler appear And how should we write portable code in the mean time This was always a plague in the C world, how to take advantage of new language features and yet keep the programs portable. Currently C is the best language for doing systems programming, however the world moves on, and new solutions keep on appearing. There were other languages for systems programming before C and there will be surely other ones afterward. In a world, where most IT projects moved away from C to Java, C and even on a smaller scale to Objective-C, will there be any major project taking advantage of C0x In my area C is only being used when the other languages are not performant enough, or for legacy projects. C will still be a long time with us, and many new applications are still being written on it, I just dont know if anyone will care for C0x. However if you care about it, have a look at Wikipedias article. Gccs support of the language and the ConceptGCC compiler. PS3 at 400 euros. At what price submitted on 2007-10-10 Sony made the announcement of a PS3 at 400 euros. We should probably be happy with it, since even I paid more than that for my PS2. But Im personally not that happy. When PS3 was announced, I as PS fan was already salivating for getting one. It was going to play blue-ray, have Cell processors and support Linux from day one, what more could a techie savy person wish for What do we have now A console that when compared to its American or Asian counterparts is handicaped. And Sony continues to keep on hold the support for the graphics processor on the PS3 Linux. It seems that Sony lost touch with their fans. The ones that made PS1 and PS2 famous and now have to depart somewhere else. Im still hoping that the situation will change, but Im not waiting forever. submitted on 2007-09-29 I have made a small Java utility to convert Sonys Multiburst image files into a more convenient file format. Which currently means animated GIF files. Just follow the header link to get the utility. Vacations submitted on 2007-09-04 Im still on vacations, now in Aveiro, after a well spent week in Lisbon. I was there showing the city and surroundings to a few german friends. They seemed to have enjoyed it. I did as well, after all it not all the time that we get to enjoy our city together with some foreign friends. I hope everyone returned safely back home and see you guys in some days. Got Approved submitted on 2007-08-19 Just got the result of my german exam that I did in may. Yes I know that is long time ago however the exams are corrected all together in Munich so they take sometime to get corrected. But I can say that I did pass the exam and now have officially C1 german level. ) Switching to another theme, if you havent seen the Simpsons movie, please do so. And stay all the way until the end, the movie is hillarious and full of small surprises. Back from Finland submitted on 2007-07-29 Im now back in Dusseldorf after a short stay in Helsiki due to one of our projects. Since I had some time after work to walk around the city, I took the oportunity to take some pictures of the city. Specially this time of the year, since they still almost have no night. You can have a look at them here . I also found out that the Portugese National TV now has a few live transmitions via Internet. Way to go RTP. If at least the other TVs would follow you. We can only wish. ) Blog finally updated submitted on 2007-07-09 Hello Those of you that were coming to my blog for the past few months may have thought that the site was dead. Actually I have done a few updates, but nothing much. Now I have using PHP5 for the blog part, and for my photo gallery. Well the photo gallery is only visible to my friends but it is a very important part of the site. I know that last year I was considering other technologies besides PHP, and to be honest I dont like it that much. But it gets the job done and is easily portable for other servers if needed. But I would gladly play around with Ruby on Rails if the oportunity comes up. ) Last week I went to the Chemical Brothers concert here in Dusseldorf. If you like them, and you happen to live nearby one of their tour places, then I advise you to go to their concert. Here it was quite cool. Busta Rhymes concert submitted on 2007-04-24 Last Friday I went to Busta Rhymes concert here in Dusseldorf. It was nice to be able to watch him live, but the concert felt somehow short. Somehow it seems that more time was spent on the bands that played before him than on his concert. But Ive also got to know Spezializtz from G. B.Z. which seem to be very well known over here. Easter Time submitted on 2007-04-06 Hi everyone. I wish you all an Happy Easter. Games for Mobiles, is it really worth it submitted on 2007-03-25 I have been a long time fan of J2ME games, always hoping for them to get better but that doesnt seem to be the case. Currently mobile games are a good busines with lots of people downloading games to play on their mobiles mostly while commuting. And lots of them are really cool, however there is one big disavantage to them while comparing to a PSP or DS. Lack of proper controls. I think there is really good potencial for proper games on cell phones, but developers need to focus on the available controls and not do simple ports of known games. My disappoint has been growing everytime I try a new mobile version of known games from Amiga or SNES days, the mobiles just werent made for them. Maybe every game developer and publisher should take care that a cell phone keyboard is not the same thing as a PS2 controller. Noubless Oblige submitted on 2007-03-03 Yesterday at Salon des Amateurs I was able to get to know a very cool Drum and Bass band. I dont know if they will support my understanding of their music style, but they are really cool nontheless. Check them out at their web site . I just add a new application for doing very simple image processing, creativily named ImageProcessor . Helau Karneval submitted on 2007-02-15 So it is time again for Carnaval in Germany. Here in NRW the country will surely almost stop until next Wednesday. If you are around just be prepared to take part into the action, or to run away if this is not your kind of thing. ) Better support for Symbian submitted on 2007-02-08 It seems that the Symbian consortium is finally realizing the pain it is to program for the Symbian OS. So they are releasing POSIX support for the OS. The project name is known as Open C. Now if they just could improve the C support as well. Linux out again :( submitted on 2007-02-01 Its been a long time since my last blog entry, so first of all I take the oportunity to wish you all a Happy New Year, even though we are already in February. This week Ive finally removed Linux from my laptop. So why did I, a Linux fan, irradicated Linux from my own laptop The answer is quite simple, lack of support. My last attempts were based on Mandriva 2007 and Fedora Core 6. These distributions were the first ones that properly supported my screen resolution and sound card out of the box. But they kept on hanging Surely an X Windows/NVidia driver problem, as I have seen before. But these crashes always meant a cold reboot, the last one even made me reflash my BIOS. I still dont understand how a OS crash can be related to a corrupted flash BIOS but it happened. And even if the Linux would be working ok, I would still need to configure the support to multimedia using the binary only win32codes, using binary drivers for my WiFi card, not be able to use my laptop remote, and I would still need Windows for gamming and Symbian development. So I just lost my patience and my laptop is again a Windows only one. Please note that this doesnt mean I lost my faith on Linux. My work is mostly done in Linux, and I have other computers with Linux installed, but this laptop will not have Linux for the time being. The sad fact about this is that we are now in 2006, 12 years after I started using Linux (slackware 2) and some problems are still the same. And even though more manufacters support Linux, some of them just do it as a marketing thing. Just look for all those network adapters manufacters that use Linux on their rooters but dont provide support for the WiFi cards. Or Sony that supports Linux on PS3 but without graphics acceleration. And I could surely get more examples. Linux is back in. Time for XBox 360 submitted on 2006-11-21 So after some experiments I was able to use Mandriva 2007 and also Fedora Core 6. Both seem to support most of the laptop, exception made to the usual Winmodem stuff and maybe the WiFi system. Anyway Mandriva default X installation kept on hanging, so now Im trying my luck with Fedora. I should also praise Microsoft for them opening XBox 360 to game hobbyists. This time they seem to have an edge start to PS3. As an happy PS2 Linux owner I was expecting better support from Sony, but they seem to think otherwise. Most available reports so far seem to suggest that even the officially supported Yellow Dog Linux isnt able to use the graphics hardware. So what the use of running Linux on PS3 if it is just for looking cool Time to drop Linux out of my Laptop submitted on 2006-10-02 This title may seem bombastic to my friends that know me as a Unix lover even though I also work with Microsoft tools every now and then. The problem is that we are currently in 2006 and after several experiments, I still havent found a distribution that supports all the hardware in my Laptop. The sound system and WiFi are still not working. I could tweak configuration files, but somehow along the years I lost the motivation to keep on doing it. And my current usage of the laptop requires the use of Windows due to some Windows only software like the Symbian SDK. So my Linux distribution is only getting digital dust. If Mandriva 2007 or Fedora Core 6 still do not support it, maybe its time to regain that lost partition. Some new stuff submitted on 2006-09-27 It has been a while since I lasted posted here. Lots of stuff have been happening. For a starters Im back to the VHS, now at medium level B2. Yep, thats right I passed my Deutsch als Fremdsprache exam. ) Paralel to that Im also doing some Photo development workshop, lets see how it goes. And to end this update, Im now playing with Symbian OS in C. Its kind of cool because it is a bit like old school coding. Ill put some results on my site when I have them ready. As usual my friends have priority over my hobby coding, so these projects tend to go a bit slow. submitted on 2006-08-14 This weekend I attended Mera Luna and it was very nice. I was afraid of attending it because of the weather conditions. But in the end it did not rain and I manage to see some interesting bands. And I also enjoyed meeting my friends. So see you next year Mera Luna See you in Lisbon submitted on 2006-08-08 A portuguese friend that I met in Dusseldorf just returned home this weekend. It was sad to see a friend go. In one hand I felt sad because it is always a sad to see a friend leave. But on the other hand I also understand that each one has to live its own life. So all the best to you Ines, and see you in Lisbon in a few weeks time. World Cup is over submitted on 2006-07-09 So today its the last day of the World Cup. It was a very interesting World Cup. Specially if you were lucky enough to live in Germany. It was very nice to live thru all the ambiance that surrounds an international event like this one. Another reason was that it was very good to see how far Portugal managed to go. Its true we got defeated yesterday but we managed to come all the way to 4th place. Most of the other countries are already at home. ) Meetin Paris submitted on 2006-05-30 I just came back from Paris after spending some time there for the MeetIn convention. I must say that it was great and I enjoyed a lot all the activities that the MeetIn Paris members organized. It was also great to get to know so many nice people from all over the world. So thanks once more and see you around in some event. The pictures will be made available still this week for the persons with access to my gallery. Barcelona submitted on 2006-05-18 My favorite spanish football team just manage to win the Champions League. It might not have been a super match, but in the end they managed to succeed. So Felicitaciones Barca. submitted on 2006-04-19 Last week a friend of mine had to go back to her country. Someone that I got to know last year and became a good friend of mine, and hopefully well keep on touch. And during the Easter hollidays I had a visit from two good friends from my time in Geneva. We amused ourselfs touring around Dusseldorf and all its terraces. This made me think a bit about friendship, and I decided to publish as a blog entry, something that everyone knows but is good to write it down. Friends is one of the best things you can get during life, just be sure you keep them How it is possible. submitted on 2006-04-07 Sometimes is incredible how people put up with buggy IDEs. Ive been trying to generate EJB mapping code with the mapping tool from a very well know IDE, and the generation keeps on failing due to some strange IDE bugs. This task is keeping me busy for a week already. How can big companies release such a buggy products. And before someone starts wondering. The mappings are correctly defined. Only with this IDE, things keep on failing. This really makes me miss the days when using a Tcl application server where this type of mapping would just take some minutes and work out of the box. Somewhat similar to the currently famous Ruby on Rails . Juanes Concert submitted on 2006-03-28 Yesterday I went with a friend to the Juanes Concert here in Dusseldorf. It was really cool. We took lots of pictures and he played most of his hits. In the end it was a very good concert. My only complain is that the concert could have been a bit longer. Stay tuned for the photos. Ill make them available as soon as I have some free time. Cebit 2006 Video and Tcl submitted on 2006-03-18 I just got an email from a friend telling me that one his Cebit videos, just made its way to the Looking Glass web site. Congratulations Oliver It seems that IBM uses Tcl as a scripting language for the Websphere server. This is quite cool, its been a while since Ive used the language for the last time. The language is quite cool and it brought me found memories from when I was working at Altitude Software. As a final note, I should add that Spring seems to be arriving to Dusseldorf. Finally I can continue to do inline skating Cebit 2006 submitted on 2006-03-13 This weekend I traveled together with a friend to my first Cebits visit. It was kind of cool to attend Cebit. The exibithion was quite big and we got to see some cool stuff first hand. I was pleased to see a section with old computers. I consider it a travel into childihood. The Linux and Sun sections were also interesting to attend. NVidias section took a few booths and was always croweded. As usual I took some pictures of the events. Cool Concert last night submitted on 2006-01-24 Yesterday, Ive attend the Misias concert here in Dusseldof. It was a very nice concert. A big part of the audience was Portuguese, but many Germans were also there. And I can say that everyone enjoyed the concert. We even had 3 encores Good luck for the next concerts, Misia. Happy New Year submitted on 2006-01-05 Its a bit late, but I guess its still on time. HAPPY NEW YEAR everyone First snowfall in Dusseldorf submitted on 2005-11-27 The first snow of 2005 Winter has just arrived I managed to take some photos from my house. And Ive updated my C and Bison tutorial for a more recent version of g. Petzolds article submitted on 2005-11-07 I just read a very nice article from Charles Petzold about the complexity of todays IDEs. Even though is talk was target to Visual Studio, I think we can apply the same reasoning to other IDEs as well. Back to Germany submitted on 2005-11-01 I am back to Germany, after some vacations in Portugal and decided to update the site as well. And I will start by removing my contratulations to the SIC Portuguese Channel. Those guys only had their site open for connections outside Portugal for a few days. Ive sent them a complaint email, joking a bit, I must confess. Got their reply saying that they cant transmit outside of the county. Feel free to read it if you understand portuguese. Now the funny thing is. The RTP and TVI channels are able to transmit outside of the country, even if they charge for it. How come SIC cant do the same SIC is now available outside Portugal submitted on 2005-09-19 Hurray I just discovered that the Portuguese TV network SIC is now available outside Portugal. MUITO OBRIGADO Of course, my main reason is to be able to keep in touch with SIC Radical. Ive also added an entry to a new parser generator, Gardens Point Oita Cinema gets a new life submitted on 2005-09-12 Ive just learned that one of my favorite cinemas back home is getting a new life thanks to the citys cinema club. Sorry but they only have information in Portuguese. Ive always had a love for good movies, you know, the type of movies that arent made just to sell popcorns. So its nice to see the cinema club getting the Oita cinema back into action. I do understand they also need to show some more comercial movies from time to time. But at least we have a group of people to thank for keeping the cinema running. Now they just need your presence. So if you are in Aveiro, Portugal just pay a visit to Oitas cinema. You might get to see a good movie. Mera Luna submitted on 2005-08-16 Last weekend I went to the Mera Luna festival to meet some friends and enjoy the music festival. Even though the weather could have been better, I had lots of fun and discovered several cool bands, like Faun. Schandmaul. Leaves Eyes. among others. If you apreciate Gothic Music then I would advise you to come by next year. Bukovina Club submitted on 2005-07-25 This Saturday I went to a concert here in Salon des Amateurs that was very good. So if you like musicians like Kusturica, take a look at Bukovina web site. If you follow the link you will get to hear some samples. Trip to Bruges submitted on 2005-07-18 The last weekend I was in Bruges, very nice town. I strongly advise you to visit it. It was lots of monuments to see, mostly churches. Exhibitions, channels like Amesterdam, and a nice gastronomy. ) If you have time, rent a bike, its really the best way to go around the city. Spanish night submitted on 2005-07-13 Yesterday I went to a Spanish night here at Zakk. Very nice party and I recomend it. I just dont know why they also had Casal Garcia on the list of Spanish wines when it is a Portuguese one. Oh well, at least it helps spread the knowledge about it. ) Another sad day submitted on 2005-07-07 So when the world thinks that we are safe, we get another attack just to remind us that it isnt so. I cant understand what makes these guys make this sort of things. My condolonces to everyone that lost a loved one in the London attack. Blogs and other stuff submitted on 2005-04-15 Im really thinking about improving this blog section. But alas, real life keeps holding my progress. So probably in a few more months before the new site version becomes available. As you might have noticed from previous entries, Ive started to put some pictures in the site. The new version will of the site will have some sort of gallery. ) Now I just have to try to go thru the rest of my working day and prepare for another weekend Have a nice weekend. New site engine part 2 and Karneval submitted on 2005-02-13 Im playing around with rails and really like it. It makes me remeber of a framework that I used to work with while at Altitude Software. It shares many of the same concepts but used Tcl instead. Will it be the foundation of the next version of this site Probably not due to lack of availability where to run it, but lets see. Last week it was Carnaval (or in german Karneval) and I took the opportunity to grab some photos of the parade. You can see them in my gallery. Enjoy. Ideas for a new site engine submitted on 2005-01-06 Im starting to be fed up of using these XML/XSLT files for the web site without much support from something else. So Ive decided to automate the generation of these files with something like PHP or Perl. What I want is the ability to add new content using a browser and nothing else. I already looked into some PHP CMS systems like Mambo and XOOPS but they seem overkill for my simple site. submitted on 2005-01-04 What can I say The amount of images that we can see from the area are nothing compared to the suffering and losses that Asien people are going thru now. So just help the international organizations so they can help them. Moving into Dusseldorf submitted on 2004-12-01 Even though I am making this entry, the 6th of January, I wanted to leave the date that I officially moved here. ) Its been two years since I left Portugal and went to work for CERN in Switzerland and leaving in France. Funny situation but pretty common in the Geneva area. Eventually I got a job at Nokia in the Dusseldorf RampD center. So here I am now in a new city, new country and starting to now German. submitted on 2004-09-15 The entry for the Lex/Yacc tool for Delphi has been updated. The owner changed the web site location. submitted on 2004-03-16 I was finally able to download tactics into my mobile phone, a Nokia 3510i. Im now in the process of tailoring the code so that the game makes the best use of the phone. submitted on 2003-12-12 The Eli entry in Compilers Toolkits. has been updated. My personal information was also updated. submitted on 2003-12-03 The tactics J2ME game has been ported to the Nookia Series 60 platform. submitted on 2003-09-30 Information about the PyGgy parser/lexer generator was added to the compilers section. submitted on 2003-09-28 Finally Ive managed to fixe some of the help files in the MapEditor. submitted on 2003-09-21 A simple tanks game that I started developing when Vodafone anounced their game competition has been added to the games section. It is called tactics. submitted on 2003-07-16 Added a small Python script that generates web galleries from a set of image files. Flipcode talks about my port submitted on 2003-06-17 Today I saw that Flipcode has a news about my The Art of Demomaking port. This was really great. ) If you have anything to suggest in the port, please let me know. submitted on 2003-05-23 The missing samples, ta-demo15 amp 16 were finally added. RSS now supported SableCC entry updated Checkers localized Compilers section updated New article A games section is now available FNC-2 entry is updated New compilers information available Programming in GNOME with C SharpCheckers was updated Checkers now in. Net New hosting C programming document A MapEditor New CV versions Fixed folders names A new version appears