Dr. Dobb's Open Source Blogs

Dr. Dobb's Now Has A Windows Phone App

Wed, 07 Aug 2013 13:57:00 -0400

Reader writes open-source app for Windows Phone 8

Non-Pavlovian Triggers

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 15:32:00 -0500

I've been playing with an inexpensive logic analyzer and some open source software to drive it lately.

Creating an Open Source Project

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 10:53:54 -0500

Creating an open source project can generate opportunities for everyone involved; more so than if the software sits dormant on a hard drive somewhere. But where do you start?

Remote Mobile Debugging in Firefox 15

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 07:02:41 -0400

Firefox 15 has a cool new remote debugging feature for mobile developers.

techBASIC 2.0 Now Available

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 07:35:25 -0400

techBASIC is a really powerful platform for students and individuals interested in learning how to program using Post PC hardware.

Android on Android

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:10:06 -0500

The PC is the new mainframe, and the tablet is the new PC.

Keeping A Healthy Tech Diet

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 07:33:13 -0500

Having spent the last six months using iOS as my primary mobile platform, I decided to live in the Android world for a spell.

MPLabX on Linux

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 16:26:00 -0500

An MPLAB project walk through

techBASIC and Seeed Studio's HiJack Dev Kit

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:32:11 -0500

Coding in a Post-PC World, Part 4

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 07:44:31 -0500

I am a big fan of writing code from a tablet. Laptops can't beat the battery life a tablet provides, nor can laptops compete with tablets on size and weight comparisons.

Coding in a Post-PC World, Part 3

Sun, 04 Dec 2011 22:51:59 -0500

A year from now, my PC will be a relic from the past, like IBM Selectric Typewriters and CRT monitors

Coding in a Post-PC World, Part 2

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 06:49:02 -0500

Android and iOS devices and the software I use to achieve my programming objectives.

Coding in a Post-PC World, Part 1

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 06:25:37 -0500

The latest trend that has captured my attention is the impact of a Post-PC world on software development. I'm not talking about how we are using our PCs to run mobile device emulators and simulators to write software for those platforms. I'm talking about actually using those new hardware devices to write code.

Is SPMD a Relevant Threading Model Anymore?

Thu, 03 Nov 2011 12:29:00 -0400

Learning to program in parallel without needing to design algorithms that rely on the programmer to dole out tasks to threads is much easier

Introducing Embree

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 13:57:00 -0400

Open source photo-realistic ray tracing kernels that take full advantage of SSE and AVX on the CPU

Intel OpenCL SDK 1.1

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 13:59:00 -0400

Optimized performance for Intel architecture processors

Tower Review: Git'ing Around the Easy Way

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 12:05:00 -0400

Tower makes working with Git repositories a breeze

Intel AVX2 Will Bring Integer Instructions with 256-bit SIMD Numeric Processing Capabilities

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 12:57:00 -0400

The forthcoming microarchitecture, codenamed "Haswell," will introduce Intel AVX2 in 2013

Somebody Turned Off That Cloud: The PSN Is Still Down with No End in Sight

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 14:52:00 -0400

Millions of customers are locked out of the Cloud (so to speak)

Quartz 2.0 for Java

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 10:16:22 -0400

Quartz is a open-source job scheduler for Java developers, and can be used to schedule tasks that range from simple to complex

Head in the Clouds

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:53:45 -0400

For developers, programming for the cloud, especially public clouds, is no simple task

OpenSolaris Governance Board Resigns

Tue, 24 Aug 2010 11:47:38 -0400

As reported by Simon Phipps, the OpenSolaris Governance board has resigned en-masse, due to lack of attention from Oracle regarding the future of the open-source OS. This, in effect, passes complete control of OpenSolaris back to Oracle. It's now up to Oracle to appoint an new board.

Web Application: IDE

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:19:58 -0400

I'm not sure I really need a simplistic IDE as a Web application. Then again, it might be handy to try some code from my phone or at someone else's PC. If you think that sounds right, have a look at IDEONE.

Standardization comes to the Cloud?

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 10:18:21 -0400

Cloud computing has done wonderful things for making web-based applications easy to deploy and scale. But, if your company's infrastructure runs on Amazon's EC2 or on Microsoft's Azure platforms, it's non-trivial to migrate that deployment to another service provider. Each offers a different deployment mechanism, different features, and a different set of challenges. In the cloud today, there really isn't any notion of standardization, and therefore, there's no real interoperability. OpenStack wants to change that.

Closing OpenSolaris?

Sat, 17 Jul 2010 14:15:52 -0400

I was a Unix user long before there was a Linux. Before Linux there were several attempts to get a Unix-like OS started: Coherent, Minux, and probably some others. I played with some of these, but they were all ultimately unsatisfying. Of course, at work we had many expensive Apollo, HP, and Sun boxes. Sun's version of Unix was Solaris and had many nice extras. I noted a few years ago that Sun open sourced Solaris and create OpenSolaris but by that time I was entrenched into Linux pretty heavily so I didn't pay much attention. Last year I got interested in better file systems and started looking at zfs. Unfortunately, Sun's licensing doesn't allow zfs into the Linux codebase, so the only way I've found to use zfs on Linux is to use a FUSE filesystem which means you really don't want it for, say, your main partitions. There is a recent native port here but I haven't tried it yet because it lacks the POSIX interface required to allow it be mountable (more about that in the related the FAQ). Of course, you can always use Solaris which supports zfs as you'd expect. I installed OpenSolaris into a virtual machine to play with it and it was very nice. But when it became clear that Oracle was going to buy Sun I decided to hold off and see what was going to happen. OpenSolaris is run by the OGB (OpenSolaris Governing Board). The July 12 minutes from the OGB had the following motion:

The OGB is keen to promote the uptake and open development of OpenSolaris and to work on behalf of the community with Oracle, as such the OGB needs Oracle to appoint a liaison by August 16, 2010, who has the authority to talk about the future of OpenSolaris and its interaction with the OpenSolaris community. Otherwise the OGB will take action at the August 23 meeting to trigger the clause in the OGB charter that will return control of the community to Oracle.

So effectively if Oracle doesn't send someone to talk to the OGB in a month, the OGB will disband. Honestly, I'm not sure Oracle is going to see this as much of a threat. As a strong Linux company, I can't imagine they would not be all too happy to see OpenSolaris whither away. I can only presume that some of the community would try to fork a new version (OpenerSolaris maybe?) since the code is GPL. But without a major backer, it seems hard to imagine that will be very productive. As for zfs, maybe Oracle will finally get it into Linux. Until then, the btrfs (pronounced "butter" fs") is in Linux and seems to work well even though there are still a few kinks to iron out in it. But I'm not anxious to adopt OpenSolaris until we see if its going to have a major backer in Oracle or some other company who might sponsor a fork.