Clang builds working linux kernel

This is huge… very huge. It has the potential to take Linux to the next level – not just by creating a faster linux. No. I believe, like OSX, it can lead to the next generation app development infrastructure – by leveraging the VM,  true platform independence and freedom from glibc hell.

Sundrop vs Android : what’s that all about ?

I’m kinda confused about Sundrop – from their description: Sundrop is a non-infringing, open source mobile OS based on Android. Sundrop is a “bring your own VM” OS allowing the flexibility to choose non-infringing JVMs, or license Java from Oracle directly or not use Java at all.  Sundrop has no certification requirements as Google does [...]

Cheap webcam in Linux (Ubuntu Karmic 9.10) with Skype

I think I found a 5$ webcam which can be used with Skype in Linux. I used Skype 2.1 with Ubuntu Karmic 64-bit. The said webcam is this : http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.13 . I am not 100% sure, since I bought a variant of it in India, but as long as the lsusb output shows Bus 002 [...]

Clojure needs donors

Just reposting a call for grassroot funding by the most exciting lisp-like project to come out in recent times – Clojure, especially since it is built over the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). This enables businesses to leverage the gazillions of existing enteprise-scale Java libraries, and still use it in a lisp like syntax. Scala (and [...]

GIT the hell out of here

Since, several open-source projects are getting hosted using distributed version-control-systems like Mercurial (my favorite) and GIT , I had to build GIT on my laptop to check out a particular repository. Now, I had to build it on Ubuntu Gutsy with http support (so I can pull and push via a remote repository). This meant [...]

COSA: Is it for real?

So today I ran across this article in EETimes about a new software development paradigm – Coherent Object Software Architecture. It seemed to work on a FSM (Finite State Machine) -cum- Decision Diagram type of model for software. Since, I have frequently given thought to parallel programming, it seemed interesting to me when it claimed: [...]

Running Glibc 2.3 apps on Redhat 7.2

Working in a software firm with its baseline support at Redhat 7.2 certainly is hard – you have to make do with several apps that are old or forgo them altogether. For all its opensource cred, Firefox 2.0 doesnt have an out-of-the-box build that works on Glibc 2.1 . However, Opera 9 does (praise their souls). [...]

George’s Question: Of threads and cores

George Harper asks a nice question - Are next gen multicore technologies even possible: One that take advantage of multiple cores at the thread (or even smaller) level. Here’s my take on it – In my opinion if there is a way of efficiently handling race conditions at the hardware level then it could (atleast partially [...]

Constructors vs function declarations…and Koenig lookups

A very curious incident happened with compilation today. “but nothing happened….” That was the curious incident. Consider the piece of code below: #include <iostream> using namespace std; class A{ public: A() {_i=5;} ~A(){cout<<”Destroying A”<<endl;} int _i; }; class B: public A{ public: B() {} ~B(){cout<<”Destroying B”<<endl;} }; main(){ A a( B() ); cout<<a._i; } Now [...]