The Rise of Real-time Linux

By Sven-Thorsten Dietrich New real-time Linux enhancements open a whole new world of possibilities for Linux, ranging across the latest 3G technologies and as near as the mobile handset in your pocket. The purpose of modifying the Linux kernel with real-time functionality: to dramatically reduce interrupt and task preemption latency, thus enabling the 2.6 kernel for use in high-performance multimedia applications and those requiring...

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J2EE and .NET: Presentation Tier Interoperability

By Binildas C.A. In this article, Binildas C.A. sheds light on this important, yet sparsely documented, area of interoperability considerations. He also discusess about some of the solutions available to work hassle-free with .NET and J2EE. The article converges at a point, and rightly so, to propose web services as a technology for attaining client side interoperability, and in that attempt, addresses two important approaches:...

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Software Product Documentation

The ideal software would be free of errors and so easy to use that everybody would be familiar with it the minute they start the application. However, this is not the case in real life. Besides the quality of the software product, there’s something else that makes or breaks the deal: technical support. The better the support software publishers and shareware authors provide, the more users are likely to buy the product.Technical support for software products can be provided in several ways: online product documentatione-mail assistanceaccess to...

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Best Practices for Risk Free Deployment

Overview The cost impact to a company of a failed project can be severe indeed. The impact on the reputation of the project manager can be disastrous. Software project management is not easy, and it requires considerable skill to successfully manage the many different risks that conspire to de-rail a project: Numerous methodologies are available for mitigating these risks – PRINCE2, RUP, DSDN, eXtreme programming – and these have helped to...

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Sorting and Searching

In this month's post-summer holiday column I cover two important topics for Makefile builders with a round up of techniques for sorting and searching inside Makefiles and on the file system. Sorting a listSorting in a Makefile is relatively simple: GNU Make provides a $(sort) function to sort a list. But there are a few of gotchas:1. The $(sort) both sorts into order and removes duplicates from a list. There's no option to just sort while retaining duplicates. For example, sorting a b a a c with $(sort) returns a list with three elements (and...

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Debugging 101

An interactive debugger is an outstanding example of what is not needed - it encourages trial-and-error hacking rather than systematic design, and also hides marginal people barely qualified for precision programming.Harlan Mills Recently, a colleague and I were working together to resolve a bug in a piece of code she had just written. The bug resulted in an exception being thrown and looking at the stack trace, we were both puzzled about what the root cause might be. Worse yet, the exception originated from within an open source library we were...

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