Technorama

An omnibus of tech posts by a Futurologist on software development primarily.

Sunday 30 October 2011

C binary number support needed

We've had support for entering numbers in a few different common bases in C since the early days. What is missing is binary support.

Existing ways of entering the decimal number 10:

int dec = 10; // Decimal
int hex = 0xa; // Hexadecimal
int oct = 012; // Octal

These are all logical, "most significant digit first" formats.

Therefore, what is missing is a logical binary format:

int bin = b1010; // Binary

The reason I propose this is because I'm a driver developer, and I often need to write to specific hardware bits. Hardware is described in bits, but I need to write the driver in Hex. So spend a lot of time converting from hex, to binary, and back again.

There are workarounds, using macros, and functions (taking a string, and converting that to an int that gets returned etc). However, what we need is native support for binary in the C language.

Labels: C99, Coding, programming

posted by 東京 # 18:15 0 Comments

Sunday 23 October 2011

Jobs on Android

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/technology-15400984

Android was only 10 months after iPhone. Google could have released a beta 1 month before Apple, then it could be the other way around. Best thing is to compete on merits, not like Jobs, by shutting down competitors who produce a better product. If Apple was so good, they wouldn't need to use courts to remove better products from consumers hands!

posted by A # 16:29 0 Comments

Monday 17 October 2011

Buy Sainsbury's basics and donate the difference to a good cause!

I noticed how the Sainsbury's Basics large bar of milk chocolate costs only 33p, one pound less than a branded bar of the same size that is fair-trade.

I doubt 1 pound goes to the fair-trade source though. I'll do it myself, re-directing that money to a good cause, and I recommend others do the same!

posted by A # 19:33 0 Comments

Ubuntu GNU/Linux needs QA and hired staff

Ubuntu's not working. Ubuntu + GNU/Linux stability in general is getting worse I recon. Not enough QA.. think we need member funded org like... ORG to hire some dev and QA staff! My WiFi drops out, and display gets corrupted.. oh, resume doesn't... resume.. sometimes.

Who would contribute £5 per month to sort out this mess?

posted by A # 18:56 0 Comments

Saturday 15 October 2011

OLPG laptop.org website ironically relies on Adobe Inc for Flash

Found it a bit bizarre that an Free Software/Open Source platform like OLPC was pushing Adobe Inc's Flash on to visitors of its website..

Especially considering the regular zero-day Adobe Flash exploits.

Labels: Adobe

posted by 東京 # 23:33 0 Comments

Linux kernel developed by the corporate giants

Great to see how many large corporations are developing the Linux kernel these days.

Red Hat, Novell, IBM, Intel, Oracle together responsible for 34% of kernel changes!

Labels: GNU+Linux, Linux, Oracle

posted by 東京 # 23:25 0 Comments

Return junk mail in the pre-paid envelopes

Great suggestion to help mitigate the wasted time and cost of Junk Mail in the UK.

"Jack, London 2009-02-11

When I get sent marketing material sent to me that contains a pre-paid envelope I put other stuff: leaflets, other junk mailing, party political, basically all the unwanted/unneed bits of paper I have laying around in the pre-paid envelope, and mail it back to them. This keeps the Post Office workers employed but costs the marketing people twice as much. I feel this makes it less cost effective for them mail me in the first place."

Labels: JunkMail

posted by 東京 # 23:23 0 Comments

National Register of Landlords

Unfortunately the government has abandoned plans to introduce a modern Scottish style National Register of Landlords in the rest of the UK :(

Bad decision by Grant Shapps and his team (part of the "coalition" axis powers!)

Shapps has given a green light to more of the Housing benefit going to bad landlords issues.

Labels: Housing

posted by 東京 # 23:16 0 Comments

University for 21st century

It strikes me as strange how poorly some universities prepare their under-grads for work in society. Courses are not targeted squarely at the reality of where jobs are available.

For instance there will be 500 "Video Game Designer" graduates each year -- there are only around 50 video game companies in the UK, and they certainly won't each hire 10.

Another example is "Documentary Photography" that could only lead into regular photography, but again there won't be thousands of job openings in this area each year.

The current University system allows people to obtain degrees in what can only be described as "hobby subjects", because in reality they are just hobbies, which don't lead to jobs.

Sociology and Psychology are other degrees which don't directly lead into jobs.

University should be modernised to include vocational elements, take Computer Science, this should be 1st year @Uni, 2nd year industrial placement with company, and 3rd year with a different company. Companies should be able to specify the curriculum for the 1st year theory.

Labels: University

posted by 東京 # 08:34 0 Comments

Friday 14 October 2011

National Ethical Investment Week, which takes place 16-22 October 2011

Labels: Investment

posted by 東京 # 17:13 0 Comments

Enhancing switch() in the C programming language

Enhancing switch() in the C programming language to support logical masks is possible, and I advocate this.

Switch only accepts values. Should accept other expressions. Otherwise we have to write if else if else if etc. These are very common when dealing with hardware, which sets specific bits to flag certain information, and then has a common interrupt etc.

size_t mask = 0x555242;
switch(mask)
{
  case (mask & 1<<4):
  {
    // processing
    break;
  }
  case (mask & 1<<2):
  {
    // processing
    break;
  }
  default:
  {
    // Nothing
  }
}

// Likewise, to check functions (needs some work to work out best way to achieve this)
switch(str)
{
  case (str_match(str, "hello")):
  {
    // processing
    break;
  }
  case (0 == str_match(str, "other")):
  {
    // processing
    break;
  }
  default:
  {
  }
}

Labels: C++, C99, Coding, programming

posted by 東京 # 17:11 0 Comments

Growing a Brain in a Dish

Labels: Science

posted by 東京 # 17:10 0 Comments

Giant on the way down...

Giant on the way down... but is it going to leave a crater? nope

Labels: Oracle

posted by 東京 # 16:56 0 Comments

Another HMRC pension tax blunder

HMRC in pension tax blunder.

Let my firm tender for HMRC functions, we'll implement a minimal tax and electronic payment system.

In other news..

HMRC are a hopeless system. Why isn't the SA302 something that I can't just request online? They have failed to get the services online for over six years now. Had it been my firm, it would have been migrated back in 2007. Put the control back in taxpayers hands

10 mins on their 0845 9000 444 number. 3 mins in menus, 8 mins in queues. No information during the queuing on expected wait time. at 25p per min, this cost me £2.50. Why is HMRC allowed to make money out of helplines?

Wish I had dialled in directly, 0161 931 9070 that would have skipped all the queues. Number retrieved from http://www.saynoto0870.com/numbersearch.php

Would have saved me the 3 mins listening to various anouncements about HMRC website, which of cause is only information, you can't do many functions like request an SA302..

Labels: HMRC, Tax

posted by 東京 # 16:53 0 Comments

Tuesday 11 October 2011

Oracle Virtual Box "Crap"

News just in that Oracle's dodgy vboxdrv is now flagged TAINT_CRAP because it is sooo flakey -- tell me something that we didn't know.

Just another example of lack of focus on QA and community involvement at Oracle. They should provide 1st line tech support for their buggy module on LKML and elsewhere.

Labels: Oracle

posted by 東京 # 22:51 0 Comments

Sunday 9 October 2011

Network Railcard - A massive money saver

"up to three adults can travel with you and they will also get 1/3 off their rail fare"

So for a trip of 4 people from Maidenhead to London, return, saving £3.33 * 4 = £13.32 ! The card only costs £25 per year! Bargain ;)

"A Network Railcard gives you 1/3 off most standard adult rail fares for travel in the Network Railcard area."

Labels: Transport

posted by 東京 # 10:44 0 Comments

Saturday 1 October 2011

Oracle on the way down?

Interesting article on Oracle. I always admired them back in the 90s (back when they started doing Network Computers with Acorn). Sun even more so (all the good stuff they've released, even now, open Java). Things have changed, Oracle has got stuck in a rut, and they've kept digging! That's fine, until they ever want to get out of that deep hole.

Oracle acquiring Sun reminded me of AOL TimeWarner merger, didn't make sense then, and doesn't make sense now. Oracle should have stuck with what it does best, databases.

However, Oracle will switch whole scale to GNU/Linux eventually, they've already started after re-packaging RedHat Linux ;)

Labels: Oracle, Sun

posted by 東京 # 23:20 0 Comments

YAAFC - Yet Another Adobe Flash Crash

Thought I'd give Adobe Flash a whirl.. same as last time I tried!

Crashed while trying to view a video.