Microsoft is not ceasing to surprise me (in a good way)

F# has been released in an open source Apache 2 license (Apache2 is not in the same league as BSD and MIT. It includes an explicit patents grant, versus GPL v2 which doesn’t.). Digest that for a little while … take some more time to savor it. With the Microsoft Community Promise, the Oracle-Java debacle [...]

Using Git on Windows without any of the Cygwin/msysgit nonsense

Git was made by Linus – of course there would’nt be a nice library which can be ported to other platforms. So the usual way of using Git on windows would be to use Cygwin/msysgit. Well there are people who want to use Git, but dont want to use the *nix way of doing things. [...]

Windows 8 = 0 advantage linux ?

This was a very interesting leak by someone at Microsoft about Windows 8. I see package management, fast boot up, power efficiency, diagnostic power tools… in short everything that linux has touted as its USP. Unless there is a big push from the Redhat/Ubuntu camps to improve drivers, usability and multimedia support – I see [...]

wbemtest like functionality in Linux

when I was working on the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), we got to use wbemtest quite a lot. Especially the root/cimv2 namspace was good to get information about system hardware. These days if someone asks me (on a windows machine about how many RAM slots it has, etc., I can look it up in wbemtest [...]

Zune (or iTunes) on Linux – the definitive guide

A lot of people come to me moaning about their inability to cross the pearly Gates (or Windows.. ’tis all the same) into Linux heaven because they will miss the enchanting tones of their Zune or iTunes. And just for the record, the Zune 30GB is a player with better sound quality than the iPod [...]

Multithreading paradigms: windows and *nix

Before we visit this topic, let us go off-topic for a bit: let us examine the CFS scheduler (part of the Linux GIT tree after 2.6.22) and the round robin Windows scheduler. The Ingo Molnar developed CFS (Completely Fair Scheduler – inspired by Con Kolivas’ SD scheduler) maintains a RB-Tree of “wait_runtime”. When a task’s [...]