If you are using any SCM that allows cheap branches (like Perforce) and are following the advices from the High-level Best Practices document, you might be interested in (or already know) Laura Wingerd’s presentation Convergence vs. Divergence: Purposeful Merging with Perforce about how to converge to codelines using Merge Down, Copy Up [PDF]. I have seen it many times that a main codeline got broken because the Merge Down, Copy Up idiom was ignored. Read More ...

I’m cleaning up shelves and have got an old “SIBO SDK 2.10” which I haven’t used in years. It is a Software Development Kit for 16-Bit Psion handheld computers like Psion Series 3 or Psion Workabout. If you are interested in two floppy disks and four folders of documentation, please drop me a note.

envvc

Did you ever have the need to use different versions of Microsofts Visual C++ compiler from the command line? Did you wish you wouldn’t have to constantly call vcvars32.bat or change your environment (PATH, INCLUDE and LIB variables)? In comes a little tool called envvc.exe. It sets the environment for the chosen version and then calls any chosen executable. As additional feature it verifies that you have installed the latest service pack for the chosen version. Read More ...

Wie diese Woche bekannt wurde, gewann Kaba-Gilgen AG aus Schwarzenburg nach einem sechsmonatigen Pilotbetrieb die internationale Ausschreibung der Pariser Métro (RATP), zwei Linien mit halbhohen Bahnsteigtüren (Platform Screen Doors PSD half-height, PDF) auszurüsten. Ich gratuliere dem ADP-Team von Kaba-Gilgen für diesen Erfolg und freue mich, dass damit auch die Arbeit von Hug-Witschi den Weg nach Paris findet. Hug-Witschi hat im Auftrag von Kaba-Gilgen die Steuerung (Hardware und erste Version der Software) der einzelnen Türeinheiten entwickelt. Read More ...

There are already many solutions to the “Santa Claus Problem” by John Trono1. It’s a “problem simple to understand and yet far from easy to solve”; the author’s original solution (based on semaphores) was only partly correct. The probably most known analysis of the problem was written by Mordechai Ben-Ari2, who also provided solutions in Ada95 and Java. This is the original problem description: Santa Claus sleeps in his shop up at the North Pole, and can only be wakened by either all nine reindeer being back from their year long vacation on the beaches of some tropical island in the South Pacific, or by some elves who are having some difficulties making the toys. Read More ...

At work, we started using dmake in 1991 (or even earlier) for building the firmware for the Vending Machine Controller Euro'90. The firmware consisted mostly of PL/M and C code and the compilers suffered from the DOS limitation of 127 characters per command line. Dennis Vadura’s dmake 3.70 (hosted by the University of Waterloo and available as DOS version) featured the $(mktmp ) macro that let me create any needed temporary config and response files. Read More ...

Even before I upgraded to OS X 10.4 (Tiger), I got the report that the Save File dialog in Realpolitik crashes. Now I have applied a quick’n’dirty fix for the next couple of days for all Tiger users and released Realpolitik 1.7.0 Alpha 2 earlier than planned. Currently I’m revamping the dialogs known to Mac developers as Navigation Services. Already done in Alpha 2 is the Open File dialog: From the users perspective you have now a working type pop-up, where you can choose Realpolitik Files (. Read More ...

The four days at the ACCU Conference in Oxford are over. Except Günter nobody seems to have blogged the C++ track. Apart from the discussions and presentations what should go into the next C++ standard (called C++0x and scheduled for 2009), one of the big topics was concurrency and a new awareness that some new ideas are needed. Herb Sutter presented the points of his recent DDJ article. As an example for an exercise simple to understand and yet far from easy to solve he mentioned the Santa Claus Problem: Read More ...

Peter Steiner

Software Developer and Opinionated Citizen

Switzerland