Posts Tagged ‘computer’
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/08/17
Programmers scale: time versus project completeness
I totally agree that Paint.NET is the best free image and photo editor on Windows.
Writing quality software takes time, not only when writing it in spare time like Rick Brewster does. Getting things “right” is a tedious process and often will set you back: just watch the graph on the right.
So I’m not surprised that it took a very long time after the first Paint.NET 4.0 idea in 2008 to get “close” to a release.
And indeed, it looks like Rick has become much closer which will please many people waiting for Paint .NET 4.
I’m really glad with the announcement that Paint.NET v3.5.11 BETA is now available – Paint.NET Discussion & Questions – Paint.NET Forum.
Edit: while writing this, the final Paint.NET v3.5.11 came out.
It paves the way for Paint .NET 4.0 update in the future, and fixes/improves quite a few things.
A few quotes from it:
This is probably not the update you were expecting I need to push out an update to v3.5 in preparation for the eventual release of v4.0 […] releasing a “beta” today […] I’ll be pushing out the Final/RTM in a few days.
The primary goal of this update is preparing for the v4.0 release: v3.5.10 will not be able to offer the v4.0 update, but v3.5.11 will. […]
Here are the changes for this release:
- Fixed: The Gaussian Blur effect was incorrectly calculating alpha values for non-opaque pixels. (http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/18483-gaussian-blur-mistreats-alpha/)
- Improved performance of the Sharpen effect by about 25%
- Improved performance of the Median effect by about 30%
- Improved performance of the Fragment effect by about 40%
- Improved performance of the Unfocus effect by about 100%
- Reduced memory usage when many selection manipulation operations are in the history/undo stack (the undo data is now saved to disk)
- The built-in updater now supports upgrading to paint.net 4.0 (once it’s available)
There have been rumors floating around that Paint.NET is “dead.” This is not true!
–jeroen
via: Paint.NET Blog | The best free image and photo editor. By Rick Brewster..
Posted in .NET, .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, Algorithms, Development, Floating point handling, Power User, Software Development, Windows, Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows Server 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista, Windows XP | Tagged: computer, software, technology | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/07/11
Don’t increase your Windows Timer Resolution. And keep an eye on programs that do:
Raising the Windows timer frequency is bad. It wastes power and makes your computer slower. Routinely doing this in all sorts of programs that end up sitting idle for hours really needs to stop.
You can use ClockRes to monitor the time resolution and what programs changed it.
–jeroen
via: Windows Timer Resolution: Megawatts Wasted | Random ASCII.
Posted in .NET, Development, Opinions, Pingback, Power User, Software Development, WPF | Tagged: computer, software, technology, timer resolution | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/06/19
The comment thread at via [WayBack] The Oracle at Delphi » Give in to the ARC side (now at [WayBack] place 1 and [WayBack] 2) is very interesting.
So soon after writing a StackOverflow [WayBack] answer on Delphi Memory Managers yesterday, [WayBack] this one by [WayBack] David M (aka vintagedave) caught my eye:
This is unannounced at the moment, but I am working on a new memory manager which does not have a global lock, and is designed for multithreaded usage, including cases where memory is allocated in one thread and freed in another, and many threads are allocating and freeing at once. It also uses a more secure design than FastMM4, which may be important for world-facing code, eg web servers. It’s a personal project which I have not yet announced, but if you are interested (Allen, Guenther, others) please feel free to contact me at vintagedave@gmail.com.
I wonder if it is better than the multithreaded Delphi memory managers I mentioned in the answer:
As a side note:
One of the reasons for using FastMM is the excellent debugging capabilities. It looks like – though not free – DDDebug extends this a lot!
I found it in Wanted: live leak detection for FastMM – DelphiFeeds.com and [WayBack] TURBU Tech » Blog Archive » Wanted: live leak detection for FastMM.
–jeroen
via The Oracle at Delphi » Give in to the ARC side.
Posted in Delphi, Delphi XE4, Development, FastMM, Software Development | Tagged: computer, memory manager, memory managers, software, technology | 9 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/06/11
Today my router had an IP-address change, but didn’t update the DynDNS.org information in my My Host Services | My Dyn Account. Which meant I could not “phone home”, as I didn’t know the new IP-address**.
Lesson re-learned:
During initial router configuration, watch the router logs, as you might have accidentally updated the DynDNS.org by hand, not by your router
Had this in the ASUS Wireless Router RT-N66U – General Log:
Jun 11 08:01:53 notify_rc : restart_ddns
Jun 11 08:01:53 ddns: clear ddns cache file for server setting change
Jun 11 08:01:53 ddns update: connected to members.dyndns.org (204.13.248.111) on port 80.
Jun 11 08:01:53 ddns update: server output: HTTP/1.1 200 OK^M Date: Tue, 11 Jun 2013 06:01:53 GMT^M Server: Apache^M X-UpdateCode: X^M Content-Length: 7^M Connection: close^M ^M notfqdn
Jun 11 08:01:53 ddns update: malformed hostname: myhostname
The problem: hostname should not only be the name of the host, but the FQDN of the host. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in ASUS RT-N66U, Network-and-equipment, openSuSE, Power User, SuSE Linux | Tagged: computer, ddns, ip address change, software, technology | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/04/11
Earlier this week, I posted abut ThinkPad W701: Win7 Ultimate x64 suddenly only saw 8GB RAM of 16GB (via: [H]ard|Forum).
One of the search results in my query indicated it would be possible to put 32GB in it.
That’s nice, as the official Lenovo ThinkPad W701 specs and Lenovo ThinkPad W701 2500 Overview & Specs – Laptops – CNET Reviews indicate it should max out with 16GB.
This Google search returns lots of results indicating people actually run it with 32GB RAM using 4x8GB memory modules:
ThinkPad W701 32GB RAM
–jeroen
via: ThinkPad W701 32GB RAM – Google Search.
Posted in Power User, ThinkPad, W701 | Tagged: cnet reviews, computer, google search, lenovo thinkpad, memory modules, technology | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/04/08
Last quarter, 11 issues of Micro Cornucopia appeared on BitSavers including the final May 1990 issue.
This month, another 7 issues appeared, most of which cover a form of Pascal in one or more of the articles and advertisements:
A fun thing to notice are the advertisements for Modula-2. Logitech Modula-2. Yes though the Logitech Wikipedia page does not mention it at all, Logitech didn’t only sell mice, keyboards and web-cams. They had more products. Being Swiss, they were big in Modula-2. And Bitsavers has a PDF of that too: Logitech_Modula-2_86_1.0_Feb84.pdf
The only issues still to be scanned are #28 till #32.
–jeroen
via: New Micro Cornucopia issues on BitSavers including the Final May 1990 issue « The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff.
Posted in Assembly Language, BitSavers.org, C, C++, Delphi, Development, History, Pascal, Software Development, Turbo Assembler, Turbo Pascal, x86 | Tagged: computer, Media, research, science, technology | 2 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/03/20
Awesome write speed while mirroring from my old Intel 320 600GB SSD (SATA) to the new OWC Mercury Electra MAX 3G 960GB SSD (USB3) on my ThinkPad W701.
On average more than 2GB per minute.
Total Copied Skipped Mismatch FAILED Extras
Dirs : 27029 27028 1 0 0 0
Files : 160965 160965 0 0 0 0
Bytes : 546.499 g 546.499 g 0 0 0 0
Times : 4:17:38 4:15:16 0:00:00 0:02:22
Speed : 38311787 Bytes/sec.
Speed : 2192.218 MegaBytes/min.
Ended : Mon Mar 18 22:16:36 2013
–jeroen
via: OWC OWCSSDEX3G960 960GB Mercury Electra MAX 3G SSD.
Posted in Hardware, Power User, SSD | Tagged: computer, megabytes, owc, ssd, technology, usb3 | 3 Comments »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/02/23
Reasons like this is why I distrust the cloud: Storage certificate expired?.
From Windows Azure Status: Service Dashboard | Technical Support:
Beginning Friday, February 22 at 12:44 PM PST, Storage experienced a worldwide outage impacting HTTPS operations (SSL traffic) due to an expired certificate. HTTP traffic was not impacted. We executed repair steps to update the SSL certificate and expect HTTPS traffic to notice gradual recovery in many sub-regions. Further updates will be published to keep you apprised of the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes our customers. Status of affected services will be updated in the table below.
–jeroen
via: Windows Azure Status: Service Dashboard | Technical Support.
Posted in Cloud Apps, Internet, Power User | Tagged: computer, expired certificate, ssl certificate, technology | Leave a Comment »
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/02/15
Thanks Lennart Aasenden for sharing this on FaceBook: Mariuz’s Blog: Adobe Photoshop 1.0 Source Code About 75% is in Pascal.
This was back when I was already a professional Turbo Pascal for PC programmer, not yet a Mac programmer, but doing Pascal on VMS to assist a client in the scaleable font industry.
The 1990 version 1.0.1 of Photoshop code was written in Object Pascal, and based on MacApp.
Back then Apple’s Object Pascal was one of the few IDEs available to develop Macintosh software. Later on, you also had Turbo Pascal and THINK Pascal (which many Macintosh developers preferred, was later acquired by Symantec, and died). A big reason they liked it so much was the THINK integrated debugger, which was lightyears ahead of any Pascal product on any other platform.
Apple had great documentation, not only on their compilers and libraries, but also one that everyone should hav read: Apple Human Interface Guidelines: The Apple Desktop Interface: Inc. Apple Computer: 9780201177534: Amazon.com: Books.
The Adobe Photoshop 1.0 source code can be downloaded (for non-commercial use) from the Computer History Museum | @CHM : Adobe Photoshop Source Code page.
The source is a very interesting read, and a great comments on it by Grady Booch.
This is how everyone should think about their code.
–jeroen
PS: A nice introduction to Object Pascal for a Macintosh is at MacTech | The journal of Apple technology..
Posted in Delphi, Development, Object Pascal, Pascal, Software Development, Think Pascal | Tagged: apple technology, computer, computer history museum, desktop interface, human interface guidelines, mac programmer, macintosh developers, object pascal, software, technology | 4 Comments »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 