Eric's Blog

Comic: Betwixt

Wed, 16 May 2012 15:35:09 +0000

New Comic: Betwixt

Raspberry Pi and Arduino

Mon, 07 May 2012 16:45:15 +0000

We’ve been a bit sad to see some people who are very passionate about the Arduino community coming down quite hard on the Raspberry Pi project as the Big Bad, suggesting that we’re trying to encroach on Arduino’s territory and offering unfair competition. It’s really not the case; we think Arduino is a marvellous thing, and we don’t feel the two are comparable – you’ll be using them for different things. Arduino uses a microcontroller; Raspberry Pi uses an applications processor. There are so...

Introducing GCMS v2

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 03:49:58 +0000

You may have noticed a few changes around here. After roughly two years of work I have finally reached a milestone on the second version of my content management system, Gatherer. After Google changed everything with the introduction of Google+, it broke the way the old version worked. It was time to bring everything up to date anyway.

While based on the same technologies, GCMS v2 is almost a complete rewrite of its predecessor. It now uses the entire Zend Framework application stack, the new Smarty 3 templating engine, and the HTML 5/CSS 3 Twitter Bootstrap template. As before, GCMS has the ability to automatically import feeds from RSS or ATOM but can now also import from Google+.

The code is completely open source under the LGPL3 license and is now hosted on GitHub. I still consider it in a beta stage at this point but it should be largely functional. Feel free to send along those pull requests!

Valve's Steam & Games Coming To Linux

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 19:19:47 +0000

An anonymous reader writes "Valve's Steam and Source Engine-based games are coming to Linux. Michael from well known site Phoronix.com has been invited to Valve's office and was able to spend a day with the developers and Gabe Newell himself. He is confirming the rumors about Linux ports from Valve, and has been able to play the games and work the developers himself. Attached in the article are pictures from Valve's offices with games running on Linux."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazon's Cloud Now 1% of Internet Traffic

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 20:03:24 +0000

An anonymous reader writes "A Wired story claims Amazon's cloud now hosts enough companies and traffic to generate 1% of all Internet traffic (and visits from 1/3 of daily Internet users). An amazing number if true. And a little scary for one company to host this much cloud infrastructure."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In Your Face, Critics! Red Hat Passes $1 Billion In Revenue

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 16:19:28 +0000

head_dunce writes "Now that Red Hat has officially posted more than a billion dollars in revenue, ($1.13 billion to be exact), the company's PR department sent this funny list of quotes predicting doom. For instance, 'We think of Linux as a competitor in the student and hobbyist market but I really don't think in the commercial market we'll see it in any significant way.' Bill Gates, 2001."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NVIDIA Is Joining the Linux Foundation

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 23:14:00 +0000

Norsefire writes "NVIDIA is joining the Linux Foundation, along with three other to-be-announced companies. From the article: 'As one of the three big makers of graphics chips for PCs--the other two are Intel and AMD, both of which are longtime Linux Foundation members--Nvidia's increased participation in Linux could be big news for users of the free and open source operating system.

Nvidia has long taken a closed approach to Linux drivers for its graphics cards, offering only a proprietary ...

PHP 5.4 Released

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 02:28:14 +0000

mikejuk writes "PHP 5.4 has been released, along with a new version of Zend Framework. It has a number of optimizations that make it faster and smaller (early estimates say 10-20% faster), a built-in webserver for testing purposes, and features that had been destined for PHP 6.0. The big addition from the now-crashed PHP 6.0 project is Traits, which are sort of a cross between a class and an interface, bringing some of the advantages of multiple inheritance to PHP. The full changelog and down...

Apache 2.4 Takes Direct Aim At Nginx

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:41:46 +0000

darthcamaro writes "The world's most popular web server is out with a major new release today that has one key goal — deliver more performance than ever before. Improved caching, proxy modules as well as new session control are also key highlights of the release. 'We also show that as far as true performance is based — real-world performance as seen by the end-user- 2.4 is as fast, and even faster than some of the servers who may be "better" known as being "fast", like nginx,' Jim Jagielski, ...

VLC 2.0 'Twoflower' Released For Windows & Mac

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 03:34:11 +0000

Titus Andronicus writes "Years in the making, the major new release of VideoLAN's media player has better support for multicore processors, GPUs, and much, much more. From the announcement: 'Twoflower has a new rendering pipeline for video, with higher quality subtitles, and new video filters to enhance your videos. It supports many new devices and BluRay Discs (experimental). Completely reworked Mac and Web interfaces and improvements in the other interfaces make VLC easier than ever to use....

Microsoft Releases Kinect For Windows

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:06:40 +0000

nk497 writes "Microsoft has released Kinect for Windows, featuring a new "near mode" that lets the gesture control tech be used as close as 40cm. The Kinect for Windows hardware will retail at $249 — well above the price of the version for Xbox 360 consoles. Microsoft defended the price difference, saying sales of games and Xbox Live subscriptions help subsidize the console version. The new version will support Windows 7 and the Windows 8 developer preview, as well as Windows Embedded 7 devic...

2011's Fastest Growing Language: Objective-C

Fri, 13 Jan 2012 22:57:14 +0000

mikejuk writes "Every January, it is traditional to compare the state of programming language usage as indicated by the TIOBE index. So what's up and what's down this year? The top language is still Java, but it's slowly falling in the percentages. Objective-C experienced the most growth, followed by C# and C. JavaScript climbed back into the top 10, displacing Ruby. Python and PHP experienced the biggest drops. If you like outside runners, then cheer for Lua and R, which have just entered th...

NVIDIA Releases Source To CUDA Compiler

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 17:01:06 +0000

An anonymous reader writes "NVIDIA has announced they have 'open-sourced' their new CUDA compiler so that their GPGPU platform can be brought to new architectures. NVIDIA's CUDA compiler is based upon LLVM. At the moment though they seem to be restricting the source code's access to 'qualified' individuals.'

The official press release implies wider access to the source will happen later. It so happens that a few days ago AMD opened their OpenCL backend and added initial support to the Free S...

Facebook Releases JIT PHP Compiler

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:07:05 +0000

angry tapir writes, quoting a Techworld article: "In its continuing endeavor to serve its 800 million users as quickly as possible, Facebook is once again revamping the way it handles its PHP-based Web pages. Facebook has posted ... its HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), which the company's engineers call a just-in-time PHP compiler. According to Facebook, this PHP execution engine is 60 percent faster than its current PHP interpreter and uses 90 percent less memory."

Facebook has a weblog post ...

Miyamoto Steps Down As Nintendo Game Design Head

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 20:25:04 +0000

RobinEggs writes "Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator and producer of the Zelda and Mario franchises among other works, is stepping down at Nintendo. After personally managing Nintendo's blockbuster franchises for ~20 years, Miyamoto said today: 'What I really want to do is be in the forefront of game development once again myself. Probably working on a smaller project with even younger developers. Or I might be interested in making something that I can make myself, by myself. Something ...

Java Tops for Hackers, Warns Microsoft

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:01:08 +0000

Patch up warmly this winter if you're running Java. That's the advice from .NET shop Microsoft, which reckons Oracle's platform is the single biggest target for hackers. Java proved the single most popular target in the 12-month period to the end of June, according to Microsoft's latest Security Intelligence Report has found here Running Java as a Web-browser Plugin is much more dangerous than Flash, and should disable the Java Applet Plugin.

PCI Express 4.0 Will Speed Up Tablets

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 01:25:02 +0000

PCI Express 4.0 is being designed with tablets in mind, according to standards-setting organization PCI Special Interest Group. The PCI-Express 4.0 bus will also go into PCs, servers and embedded devices. PCIe 4.0, will transfer data at up to 16 gigatransfers per second over copper wire. That is twice the speed of PCIe 3.0, which was finalized in late 2010 and is just reaching products.

Khronos Releases OpenCL 1.2 Specification

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 02:46:32 +0000

The Khronos Group today announced the ratification and public release of the OpenCL 1.2 specification, the latest update to the open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors. Released eighteen months after OpenCL 1.1, this new version provides enhanced performance and functionality for parallel programming in a backwards compatible specification that is the result of cooperation by over thirty industry-leading companies. Khronos has updated and expa...

$50,000 To Solve the Most Complicated Puzzle Ever

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 02:33:07 +0000

An anonymous reader writes "A team from UC San Diego is using crowd-sourcing as a tool to solve the most complicated puzzle ever attempted, which involves piecing together roughly 10,000 pieces of different documents that have been shredded. (The challenge is designed to reveal new techniques for reconstructing destroyed documents, which are often confiscated by troops in war zones). The prize for solving this jigsaw puzzle is $50,000, which the UCSD team has decided to share among the people...

Brazilian ISPs Hit With Massive DNS Attack - Slashdot

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 23:33:10 +0000

wiredmikey writes "Millions of people in Brazil have potentially been exposed to malware, as a result of a nationwide DNS attack. Additionally, several organizations in Brazil are reporting that netwo...