Wind River Blog Network

Tech Support for Geeks

By Doug Gaff

Over the holiday break, I waited on the phone 30 minutes to hear a tech support person sing Celine Dion in my ear while telling me to reset my cable modem.

Ok, let me back up a bit.

I switched to a new Cable/Phone/Internet provider last week. You know the drill – the promotional period expires on your current plan and your monthly bill goes up 30%. Fortunately, there are two Cable providers (Comcast and RCN) in my town, and Verizon FiOS is coming this year. Hooray for competition, although would it kill these companies to just make the promotional price the regular price and keep me as a customer? Oops my bad. I forgot that Capitalism = bilking money from as many customers as possible for as long as possible.

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Zune 30, Killed by Complexity

By Doug Schaefer

I first heard of it early New Years Eve, I guess. Hoards of Microsoft Zunes were committing mass suicide (a gruesome thought but the actual quote from the Slashdot article). Fears rose that some Y2K thing was happening, mind you things like that didn't happen in Y2K, at least not on this scale. Microsoft finally confirmed the issue as such though, a device driver hang on the 366'th day of a leap year. I'd love to see that code...

Well, thanks to the wonders of the internet, here it is! (I imagine this link will fall dead as soon as the Microsoft cronies make the rounds, as they should. It does have a Microsoft copyright). I actually found it through another blog where the guy put together a pretty good analysis of the problem.

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Five Years

By Mike Deliman

Five Years.  It doesn't seem like much.  About 1/20th of a long human life span.  20 times 90 days.  The amount of time it takes (roughly) from birth until entering school/pre-school/kindergarten.  A reasonable span between sabbaticals,   Can you think of where you were 5 years ago?

A five year mission is what Enterprise was sent on, "where no man had gone before."

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Predictions for 2009

By Doug Schaefer

I'm not usually one to make predictions. It's hard for me to tell the difference between a prediction and wishful thinking. But this article over at the Inquirer (still the best place to get an honest take on the industry along with /.) got me thinking about a couple of things I think are going to be important in 2009. So here we go...

2009: The Year of the GPGPU

This is more a continuation of a trend but the Inq article made some great points that I think will put some spotlight on general purpose programming with GPUs. The key one, is the recent standardization of a cross platform way of programming these things, OpenCL. ATI and nVidia have already signed up to provide OpenCL support for their chips and look for Intel's Larrabee platform to come with the same. I think there is still some software and hardware architectural things that need to be done to make GPGPU more efficient and easier to program. Look for LLVM (which needs an article on it's own) to play a role, as it already is with OpenGL, and look for one of the chip vendors to put a GPU on the memory bus shared with the CPU and make these things sing.

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A look at WebKit

By Doug Schaefer

A few days ago, I was playing with Google's V8 JavaScript VM library and got it compiling with MinGW in Wascana. I submitted the patch to make it work but I haven't heard back. I guess it could be the Christmas break.

But one thing that struck me odd recently was an announcement that the next rev of Android would include WebKit's SquirrelFish Javascript VM. I guess that shouldn't be too surprising since SquirrelFish comes with Webkit. But then why is there ARM support (the CPU for Android) in V8? And if they are using SquirrelFish for Android, why don't they use the souped up SquirrelFish Extreme for Chrome? Especially since there are benchmarks showing it beating V8. I'm confused and can only chalk it up to Google being a big company and maybe the Android people don't hang out with the Chrome people.

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I’m addicted to information

By Doug Gaff

Over this lovely holiday break, I have decided to catch up on {everything}. Starting next year off with a clean to do list seems like a good idea. Before I left work for the holidays, I managed to get my inbox down to 3 or 4 items. (If you think you're one of those 3, you'd better remind me via email.) But email is just one of my problems, an antiquated one in fact.

Most of the good stuff comes in through RSS feeds. I counted them a couple of days ago: 97 feeds. They breakdown roughly into the following categories: Business, Culture, Humor, Software, Technology, Work, odds and ends. Unfortunately, many of these feeds have high update rates, like BoingBoing, LifeHacker, and the collection of work-related feeds. Even PlanetEclipse, my first RSS feed, has become a challenge to follow in my expanding list. I've already dropped several others because the signal-to-noise ratio was too low.

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VirtualBox 2.1 and assorted Christmas Fun

By Doug Schaefer

Just some random thoughts on this Saturday after Christmas. My family and I had a good Christmas, despite a little "Fun with Autism" moment with my Autistic son, but it's all better now (patience is a key survival technique in our household). Yesterday was Boxing Day in Canada, which is a holiday here despite all the stores being open for your shopping pleasure. If you don't feel like going out, you are free to sit around, well, like boxes, which we did for the most part.

I'm spending a little time today while everyone is playing on the PS3 and various PCs around the house getting ready for my EclipseCon tutorial. I'm really looking forward to it. By the end of the tutorial, you'll walk away with Wascana which you use to build qemu, a little Debian Linux image running in that qemu, and a cross-compile toolchain and CDT integration that you also get to build to create apps for Debian from Windows (and maybe Linux). Lots of hands on and hopefully an appreciate of why the CDT is the first class cross-platform C/C++ development environment.

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I could have had a V8, oh wait, I do

By Doug Schaefer

I've always been intrigued by programming languages and what makes them tick, and what is the best one for what situation. That's why Dave Thomas's keynote at ESE still has me thinking about the mix of JavaScript and C++. So much so that I spent a few hours this weekend while waiting out the snow storm to get Google's V8 JavaScript VM building under MinGW for Wascana. I think it would be an intriguing addition to have the VM DLL available for developers using Wascana. With a few changes, I have it building and passing the unit tests and I have a patch into the V8 project. I'll make V8 available in the Wascana 1.0 alpha in the next couple of days.

Now that I have it, I have to ask myself - what the heck do you do with it? I've thought about building wrappers for the wxWidgets library to let you build thick client apps in JavaScript. wxWidgets also comes with Wascana, and thick client apps is kinda what Wascana is all about (aside from dreams of using it for game development, which could also benefit from a fast JavaScript engine).

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Fun with FEEDJIT

By Doug Schaefer

I'm not sure if you noticed, or are reading this blog from one of the syndication sites it gets copied too (like Planet Eclipse, or the Wind River Blog Network). But if you check back to the original site and scroll down a bit, you'll see a new panel called the FEEDJIT Live Traffic Feed. I know people express concerns about web things following them, and if I get enough negative response to it I'll pull it off. But in the meantime, I'm spellbound by this feature.

I'm learning quite a lot about the audience for this blog. The traffic feed gives me the city that where the person was, which is spread throughout the world, as well as a hint at how they got to my site. A few people come directly, I guess from an RSS reader where they've subscribed one way or another (Thank you!). More often, though, people end up here based on google searches, and I get the snippet that they were searching for! Creepy, but very useful.

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December 2008 Board Meeting

By Doug Gaff

Eclipse Board of Directors just completed our Q4 face-to-face in San Francisco. This was a 2-day meeting jammed with topics. I've focused this tome mostly on the committer-related issues. Watch for the official board minutes, and my apologies for the length. Board topics:

• Project Plans and the Roadmap
• Industry Working Groups and the Eclipse Mobile Working Group
• Miscellaneous procedural items, including updates on ESE 08 and EclipseCon 09
• The Galileo release and the newly-revived Architecture Council
• Budget and executive compensation review
• EPIC proposal for improvements
• Annual Strategic Developer reports
• Discussion on Strategic Developer contributions to the common good

The Board approved the following amendment to the Eclipse Development Process:

For any Project to pass a Continuation Review, Graduation Review or Release Review it must have a current project plan, in the format specified by the EMO, available to the community.

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