2 more issues got on-line both close to a 100 pages each:
So the only issues missing are #28, #30 and #31.
–jeroen
Posts Tagged ‘technology’
2 More Old Micro Cornucopia issues on BitSavers from 1986
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/07/17
Posted in Assembly Language, BitSavers.org, C, C++, Development, History, Pascal, Software Development, Turbo Pascal, Turbo Prolog, x86 | Tagged: Media, technology | 1 Comment »
Windows Timer Resolution: Megawatts Wasted (via: Random ASCII)
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.
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Posted in .NET, Development, Opinions, Pingback, Power User, Software Development, WPF | Tagged: computer, software, technology, timer resolution | Leave a Comment »
Nat Friedman – Instant Company
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/07/08
Totally forgot to post this at the end of 2011: it ended up in the drafts on 2012-12-13. So here it is: Nat Friedman at the start of Xamarin, comparing it to the time when they started Ximian.
It is fun to see which things are still there, and how they function now.
Nat Friedman – Instant Company.
Instant Company
Starting a company in 2011 is great. Back in 1999, when we started Ximian, the only tools a small startup could afford for their internal infrastructure were mailman and perl. It was ugly.
In 2011, the best tools on the planet cost $25/month, billed to your credit card. In just a few minutes you can have better infrastructure than most fortune 500 companies. It’s incredible.
So part of my first three weeks as CEO of Xamarin has felt like a trip to a toy store. Everyone loves window shopping, so here is a list of some of the tools we’re using to run our startup:
Google Apps. Mail, calendar, internal wiki, and shared document editing. Cost: $5/user/month.
Github Bronze. All of our code is stored in github’s private repositories. We love github. $25/month.
Asana. This is our task management tool and it’s fantastic. It’s the only distributed task system I’ve ever used that’s as fast as typing into a text editor. Asana is a new startup from Dustin Moskovitz, the founder of Facebook, and their product is in Beta. Our team loves using it and we predict great things for Asana as it rolls into launch.
Stripe. Stripe is a payment system designed for programmers. They have a beautiful API that’s so simple you can integrate it into your site in less than ten minutes. If you’ve ever had to use Paypal Payments Pro, you will have a deep appreciation for stripe. They don’t require a merchant account and their JavaScript API allows you to transmit credit card information directly from the customer’s browser to stripe’s servers without redirecting the user to a stripe.com page. This reduces your PCI compliance burden without hobbling your payment workflow. Stripe will power our online store and future transaction systems. These guys are in beta too. They’re going to take over the world.
Themeforest. When I first discovered themeforest I thought it would be a wasteland of machine-generated CSS and generic templates. But the site is full of hand-coded, cross-browser gems for $15-30 a pop. There’s no substitute for high-end design, but if you need to get a decent-looking site up quickly, it’s your best bet, and far cheaper than it should be.
IRC + bip. We’re a distributed team, and having a place we can all hang out together online is very important to us. We wanted to find a for-pay, hosted group chat system that we loved, but campfire was too laggy, HipChat didn’t allow you to signin multiple places, and we didn’t feel we could trust a free solution like Convore. In the end we setup ngircd on a low-end, dedicated linode, configured to force SSL. A lot of us use bip as a proxy to maintain a persistent connection and show a backlog when you reconnect.
UnlimitedConferencing. For phone conferencing, we setup a $49/month account with unlimitedconferencing.com. We don’t pay a per-minute fee and international people can dial-in over skype to save money on long distance. It works fine.
Assistly. To handle incoming support requests from our future customers, we’ve looked at TenderApp, ZenDesk, and Assistly. We settled on Assistly after a support tech who’s worked with all three told us she prefers Assistly because it’s faster and easier to use. $69/support agent/month.
Linode and Rackspace. We use linode to setup quick Linux servers, and Rackspace for Windows servers. They’re cheap, reliable, and fast. If you need more power, a dedicated server from somewhere like 1and1 will do the trick. It’s surprising how far you can go on a $30/month linode. I’ve been using Linode for years and love them.
EFax, Scanner Pro for iPhone, and PDFPen. It’s a dwindling fact of life that you need to send and receive faxes to do business. These three items have eliminated fax machines for us. We use EFax to forward incoming faxes to an email address. You can also use it to send faxes online. PDFPen is a mac app that blew me away when I took a JPEG and converted it to an OCR’d PDF in just a few seconds. You can also use it to mark up and to edit PDFs. And you can use Scanner Pro to convert a phonecam photo into a PDF that looks like it came off a scanner. You can even fax it directly from the phone (for a fee). It’s been a lifesaver.
BizSpark. BizSpark is Microsoft’s program to give startups free licenses to basically any piece of Microsoft software, including access to MSDN. If you plan to use any piece of Microsoft software, it’s a great program.
Ravix Group. One of the things we learned from Ximian is the value of signing on a part-time CFO from day one. At the very least you want a controller to keep your books in order and setup payroll and insurance, or you’ll have a big cleanup process later on. A higher-level finance person can also be very useful in helping you think through cap tables and convertibles notes and online billing and taxes and so on. We interviewed a bunch of individuals doing part-time CFO consulting for various startups. Their fees varied from a $6,000 monthly retainer plus 0.25% of post-series A equity, to $125/hour flat. In the end, we got some great references from Ravix Group, a firm that do outsourcing of financial and HR tasks for startups. They have a deep team and can assign various individuals to your tasks as appropriate. We’ve only just started working with them but it looks great so far.
Ropes and Gray. There’s no substitute for a great lawyer, and we have one of the best firms in the country with Ropes and Gray. Our team there is incredibly responsive, works weekends and late nights, and knows their stuff. Like working with a CFO, having a great lawyer has some benefits you might not expect: in addition to their legal expertise, they see a lot of deals, and can tell you what’s “market” and what isn’t. We never would have raised our Series B financing at Ximian without Ropes and Gray, and we’re happy to be working with them again.
I’m sure there are some other great products out there, but this is our list. Hopefully it’s helpful to someone who’s just starting to do the research. It really is a wonderful time to start a company.
Copyright © 1998 – 2011 Nat Friedman
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Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: nat friedman, software, technology | Leave a Comment »
#Fail: @SugarSync prompts me to install 2.0.27, but release notes only lists me 2.0.23. Time to skip a version.
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/07/03
On my MacBook Retina, SugarSync prompts me to install 2.0.27, and directs me to the SugarSync 2.0 Release Notes that only lists me 2.0.23. Time to skip a version…
–jeroen
via: SugarSync 2.0 Release Notes – desktop and web apps – current release.
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Posted in Apple, Mac, MacBook, MacBook Retina, Power User, Windows | Tagged: Apple, technology | Leave a Comment »
Is there a Google Reader replacement that keeps ALL Google Reader history?
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/06/19
A while ago, I posted Google Reader alternatives: did you make a choice yet? indicating this about Feedly:
PRO: GR imported posts contains all history (even from blog feeds that are now defunct)
Well, I was proven wrong by this Feedly posting about the migration to their own cloud: [IMPORTANT] Preparing to be upgraded to the new feedly cloud | Building Feedly.
The one part we did not migrate from google reader is your history (too much data) so you have to expect that you are starting from a blank history and your unread counts will be reset. This is a one time issue.
Is there any Google Reader replacement that imports full history?
–jeroen
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Posted in About, Google, GoogleReader, Personal, Power User | Tagged: google, migration, technology | Leave a Comment »
Vintage Dave is working on a new multithreaded memory manager for Delphi that does not have a global lock
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:
- [WayBack] ScaleMM now at [WayBack] GitHub – andremussche/scalemm: Fast scaling memory manager for Delphi
- [WayBack] SynScaleMM (based on ScaleMM)
- [WayBack] TBBMM
- [WayBack] TopMM
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.
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Posted in Delphi, Delphi XE4, Development, FastMM, Software Development | Tagged: computer, memory manager, memory managers, software, technology | 9 Comments »
Delphi XE4 Update 1 is out (via: Installing the Platform Assistant on a Mac – RAD Studio)
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/06/12
Over the last couple of days, I was asking myself
“wow, the docwiki has been updated for the Delphi XE4 update 1 version of the Mac edition of the Platform Assistant, how long until the official update is out?”
These URLs from Installing the Platform Assistant on a Mac – RAD Studio didn’t work for a couple of days:
- http://altd.embarcadero.com/release/radstudio/11.0/PAServer/RADPAServerXE4_upd1.pkg
- http://installers.codegear.com/release/radstudio/11.0/PAServer/RADPAServerXE4_upd1.pkg
Now they do!
The reason is that yesterday Embarcadero released 29446 Update 1 for Delphi, C++Builder and RAD Studio XE4 that fixes lots of stuff: Fix list for Update 1 for RAD Studio XE4, Delphi XE4 and C++Builder XE4.
Note it is not referring to Readme – Help Update 1 for Delphi and C++Builder XE4 – RAD Studio which got released last week as 29436 Help Update 1 for Delphi, C++Builder and RAD Studio XE4. It is the real Delphi XE4 Update 1.
The cool thing: finally it is a binary patch. Not fast about as fast as a full uninstall/reinstall), but at 336 megabytes a much smaller download than the 3.7 gigabytes of 29451 Delphi XE4 and C++Builder XE4 ISO (including Update 1).
Patched update versus full uninstall/install is a trade off:
- Patch can take a couple of hours, and is CPU bound (too bad most of it is bound to a single CPU core)
- Uninstall/reinstall is disk-speed and disk-size bound (make sure you have 15+ gigabytes free; an SSD improves this process a lot)
altd, ftpd, keeping off-line downloads Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Delphi, Delphi XE4, Development, Software Development | Tagged: software, technology | 2 Comments »
ASUS RT N66U did not update DDNS with changed IP addres
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 »
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Posted in ASUS RT-N66U, Network-and-equipment, openSuSE, Power User, SuSE Linux | Tagged: computer, ddns, ip address change, software, technology | 2 Comments »
Google Reader alternatives: did you make a choice yet?
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/05/22
My Google Reader alternatives shortlist comes down to these 3
Feedly:
- PRO: imports GR including which posts you already read.
- PRO: GR imported posts contains all history (even from blog feeds that are now defunct)
- CON: slows down browser considerably
- CON: UI has too much whitespace
- CON: UI is slow (browsing with j/k takes ages)
CommaFeed & InoReader & The Old Reader
- PRO: uses as much screen estate as possible
- PRO: very fast UI
- CON: GR import misses the read/unread markers
- CON: GR import incomplete (so now defunct feeds do not appear)
One of the reasons I want to have the defunct feeds, is that it contains the old blog of a friend that passed away.
–jeroen
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Posted in Google, GoogleReader, Power User | Tagged: blogging, technology, ui | 10 Comments »
memories of the past: BitSavers.org just added a whole bunch CRAY documents
Posted by jpluimers on 2013/05/16
Nobody but very wealthy research institutions could afford CRAY machines.
They were the computing workhorse of their time. Now your smartphone is faster (:
BitSavers just added a bunch of CRAY documentation of the 1980s and early 1990s.
–jeroen
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Posted in BitSavers.org, History, Power User | Tagged: cray documentation, cray machines, technology | Leave a Comment »
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 