Gmail turns 3 this year. When announced on April 1st, 2004 people thought it was an "April Fools" joke. However at the time the one Gigabyte for email storage it offered was four times that of Microsoft's Hotmail.
Yahoo now is offering unlimited storage (up from 1Gb) and it would appear that Microsoft has upped the Hotmail storage to 2Gb.
What sets Gmail/Google apart is their ease of integration and the ever increasing products (Gmail, blog, desktop search, notebook, analytics, etc) in the Google software family.
Wednesday, 28 March 2007
Tuesday, 27 March 2007
Visual Studio turns 10 years old
It's hard to believe that Developer Studio turned ten years old on March 19th. While I'm not big time Developer Studio Power User I do use it each and every day to write server side software and have so since 1999. Here's why I like Developer Studio.
What I don't like.
I still use ddd and Emacs when programming in the unix world and quite honestly I could easily go back to the world of emacs-man-ddd instead of using an integrated IDE like Developer Studio but as long as my employer insists on running the data center on Win32... so be it.
- MSDN -- w/o a doubt the best online C++ help
- Intellisense
- Debugger
What I don't like.
- Resource Hog
- Leaving the IDE running long term (multiple days) consumes memory and becomes sluggish
- Sometime Intellisense freaks out and takes minutes to rebuild its database
I still use ddd and Emacs when programming in the unix world and quite honestly I could easily go back to the world of emacs-man-ddd instead of using an integrated IDE like Developer Studio but as long as my employer insists on running the data center on Win32... so be it.
Monday, 26 March 2007
The discipline of writing software
I've been using C/C++ static analysis tools for almost 20 years now. By 'static analysis' I mean lint. Lint on VAX/VMS; Lint on UNIX; Lint on Win32. By far the best static analysis tool I have ever used is PC-Lint/Flexelint by gimpel.
If you think that your compiler w/ warnings turned to the maximum value will catch your mistakes, you are wrong and are wasting your employer's revenues with your ignorance.
Compilers convert text files into machine instructions. The warnings they generate are merely secondary/tertiary artifacts of this process.
Most recently I presented a three year case study to my employer that clearly shows how the use of PC-Lint reduced software defects from 80%->60%->20% during that three year period.
Not only does lint catch your defects, but by repeatedly seeing the same errors it causes the astute programmer to rethink how he implements software.
If you think that your compiler w/ warnings turned to the maximum value will catch your mistakes, you are wrong and are wasting your employer's revenues with your ignorance.
Compilers convert text files into machine instructions. The warnings they generate are merely secondary/tertiary artifacts of this process.
Most recently I presented a three year case study to my employer that clearly shows how the use of PC-Lint reduced software defects from 80%->60%->20% during that three year period.
Not only does lint catch your defects, but by repeatedly seeing the same errors it causes the astute programmer to rethink how he implements software.
Open Source Google Desktop Gadgets
Sometimes it's good to share. With that in mind, three of our most popular gadgets have been open sourced under Apache License 2.0 and are now hosted at code.google.com:
Moon Phase
Ticker for Trekkers
Wikipedia Search
If you've never visited code.google.com project hosting, you're in for a pleasant surprise. It's a completely free project-hosting solution that features source control, issue tracking, and a simple, clean interface.
So go ahead, jump on board, and start working on that feature you've always wanted. Please contact a project owner to be included in a project.
Even if you don't intend to contribute, please report issues and offer feedback.
We encourage gadget developers to take advantage of the talented Google Desktop development community by open sourcing their own gadgets on code.google.com. More information about project hosting is available at http://code.google.com/hosting.
More gadgets will be open sourced, so stay tuned. But most importantly, have fun!
Moon Phase
Ticker for Trekkers
Wikipedia Search
If you've never visited code.google.com project hosting, you're in for a pleasant surprise. It's a completely free project-hosting solution that features source control, issue tracking, and a simple, clean interface.
So go ahead, jump on board, and start working on that feature you've always wanted. Please contact a project owner to be included in a project.
Even if you don't intend to contribute, please report issues and offer feedback.
We encourage gadget developers to take advantage of the talented Google Desktop development community by open sourcing their own gadgets on code.google.com. More information about project hosting is available at http://code.google.com/hosting.
More gadgets will be open sourced, so stay tuned. But most importantly, have fun!
Sunday, 25 March 2007
Algorithmic-Trading blog created
In order to spare professional traders and software engineers working on algorithmic-trading from my mindless brain droppings about science and software in general I have created an algorithmic-trading blog. I hope this enhances the reading experience for all involved.
Friday, 23 March 2007
Researchers develop intelligent, driverless car
One question... "At whom will I point my 'driving finger' when a driverless car cuts me off at an intersection?If you thought intelligent cars capable of negotiating a city centre with no driver behind the wheel were just the dream of Hollywood film writers you could be wrong. Researchers at the University of Essex think their work developing an autonomous model car could pave the way for intelligent driverless cars.
Full Article Here
Thursday, 22 March 2007
GOD is REAL unless declared INTEGER
John Backus, team leader for IBM in the 1950s, and credited for 'inventing' FORTRAN has passed away. Backus assembled a small group of IBM employees to "develop an easier way to program IBM's new 701 machine". What resulted was, in 1954, a paper titled, "Preliminary Report, Specifications for the IBM Mathematical FORmula TRANslating System, FORTRAN." Backus stayed with IBM for nearly 40 years before retiring in 1991.
Having learned FORTRAN 77 as my first 'real' language, on a CDC Cyber 205, I still have a fondness for it. I recall many a night, as an undergrad, punching cards containing what today seems like trivial lines of code, but at the time was a very complex problem. Waiting for the card reader to swallow the stack of waxed color coded cards containing FOR loops and SUBROUTINE brings back a flood of emotions and memories. Will the program compile? Will the card reader jam? When will I get my output? The undergraduate lab was in the basement of the Weber building on the campus of Colorado State University and as such there was a unique smell that came from being below ground level in an old building. A set of electrical conduits clearly visible because it was easier to run the power cables outside the walls created an industrial effect.
Side Note: Most creative use of the waxed punch cards? A civil engineering professor I worked for used the small rectangular chaff as surface analysis visual aids when filming hydrodynamics in river and flood plain studies. He'd have me duplicate a card that had every possible hole punched. I would go through boxes of minty fresh cards reducing them to Swiss cheese. We would then sprinkle the chaff on the surface and film the swirls and eddies.
Having learned FORTRAN 77 as my first 'real' language, on a CDC Cyber 205, I still have a fondness for it. I recall many a night, as an undergrad, punching cards containing what today seems like trivial lines of code, but at the time was a very complex problem. Waiting for the card reader to swallow the stack of waxed color coded cards containing FOR loops and SUBROUTINE brings back a flood of emotions and memories. Will the program compile? Will the card reader jam? When will I get my output? The undergraduate lab was in the basement of the Weber building on the campus of Colorado State University and as such there was a unique smell that came from being below ground level in an old building. A set of electrical conduits clearly visible because it was easier to run the power cables outside the walls created an industrial effect.
Side Note: Most creative use of the waxed punch cards? A civil engineering professor I worked for used the small rectangular chaff as surface analysis visual aids when filming hydrodynamics in river and flood plain studies. He'd have me duplicate a card that had every possible hole punched. I would go through boxes of minty fresh cards reducing them to Swiss cheese. We would then sprinkle the chaff on the surface and film the swirls and eddies.
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