Sunday, September 27, 2009

OpenSolaris distro - AuroraUX makes Frontpage of Reddit !

Reddit Article.

I know I have not updated my blog in a year or so now, Simply not had the time due to working on AuroraUX^[1] and LLVM/Clang and Compiler-RT (Our toolchain) upstream as well so that everyone will benefit.

I think there maybe is a bit of misconception that we are trying to reinvent the wheel totally.

This of course is not practical to make a *usable* OS today.

We simply just would like to bring together some partially good technologies such as LLVM and rewrite some things in Unix that have long needed a revisit for usage on the desktop in 2009 and onwards.

A good quality window manager that is not over convoluted, stable and no memory leaks however still easy to use and very *fast*/desktop interactiveness is key.

We would like to revisit Xorg, However we need more developer traction and needs to be talked about in a lot of depth. However a rewrite of the Unix windowing system is far more needed then yet another kernel. Something portable that everyone can benefit from, not just AuroraUX.

Please do drop around #auroraux on irc.freenode.net and say good day.

Cheers,
Edward.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AuroraUX

Monday, March 9, 2009

Qt Creator 1.0 is out with Qt4.5. Installing on Ubuntu HOWTO

Hi,

Here is a quick and dirty HOWTO:

Download yourself the SDK from here: http://www.qtsoftware.com/downloads

sudo apt-get install libfontconfig1-dev libxext-dev libxrender-dev libSM-dev libglib2.0-dev

They have a nice IRC room on Freenode, #qt-creator

Have fun,
Regards,
Edward O'Callaghan.

Saturday, February 7, 2009

The World Is Ending, So What !

Today I received a somewhat distressing text message that I would like to hear by quote,

"Over half the country is 40c. Fire storms hit Victoria last night killing over 40 people and wiping out 26 towns and the heat wave in Adelaide still hasn't stopped; nearly two weeks of 40c there. Death toll picking up there in a big way."


After thinking about this for approximately 60-odd seconds, I propose the following response, as a viable solution, to the above problems which appear to be emerging around the planet.

Shut up and deal with it! These are the consequences of your actions, i.e. driving your 2L+ motor vehicle to the shops around the corner just to pick up a can of Cola, not taking a "real" active interest in your home power usage.

Instead you "choice" to spew out your constant worthless propaganda that has absolutely no effect at all on climate change!

You also make the choice not to educate yourselves in any of the relevant matters only to uses others 'opinions' in newspapers from people who really don't have a clue instead of reading something more worth while, such as, for example, The New Science magazine, which has been written by people with real "understanding" on the highly complex matters involved in large scale ecological changes.

A quick test to prove the above point would be to ask a 'climate change propaganda fanatic' what the base units are of a kW ( 1,000 J/sec ) or about the materials used in the manufacturing or disposing of low energy usage fluorescent lighting.

I also like to throw this one point in about the usage of non energy responsible software - something we will be strongly innovating with AuroraUX. Take antivirus type products as an example: I ask the reader to take it upon themselves to work out the amount of carbon put into the atmosphere per year purely from the power required in the usage of a Norton AV running over 40min, once per week on a 350watt system running XP (noting that AV max's out CPU and Disk), thus putting the system under stress and waking the CPU up out of its C states while spinning up the disk over all the installs in the UK alone. You may get an estimate from BroadBand user numbers for PC's in the UK that maybe running AV software like the above.

Another hot topic is that of Nuclear power. This is something that few people have any real comprehension about and what our power requirements "really" are in cities such as Sydney, London, etc...
People would rather have a 20-30 year old reactor running than an updated, safer reactor that could meet our exceedingly high power demands. As Coal and Nuclear are the "only current" viable solution to meet our demands, the following "must" happen:

A) Drastically reduce round the clock power usage.
B) Use more Nuclear based power generation or continue to burn metric tons of Coal per min!

Feel good campaigns, such as turning off all your lights for an hour each year (Earth Hour), mean nothing at all apart from pissing off power companies.

You can NOT spin down the massive multi-phase generators used in power electricity production. Power companies will simply have to find other ways to waste hours worth of Coal generated electricity and the likes instead of making good use of it!

In summary,

People who spew constant uneducated, non-researched propaganda should shut the hell up and stop complaining about the consequences of their actions. Go research a topic in depth and then make a productive contribution to the matters at hand. Try taking a real and active interest in your own power usage.

Note that the Victoria fires and Queensland floods could be considered 'bad examples' although this has no effect the above points.

Thank you for reading,
Edward O'Callaghan.

-- Update 09/02/09 --
Death Toll up to 111 people in Victoria.

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Mounting a FreeBSD partition on Ubuntu 8.10

I though I would make a note of this:

# export DISK=sda1 MOUNT_POINT=sda1
# mkdir -p /mnt/${MOUNT_POINT}
# mount -r -t ufs -o ufstype=ufs2 /dev/${DISK} /mnt/${MOUNT_POINT}

Hope this helps someone :p
Edward.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

I love hg.

No no.. not the element.
I though I would share the rollback thing hg has and how neat and easy it is to use.

[edward@SXCE-Workstation]:/AuroraUX/KDE4/KDE4-Testing/kde4-specs-dev:~>hg rollback
rolling back last transaction
[edward@SXCE-Workstation]:/AuroraUX/KDE4/KDE4-Testing/kde4-specs-dev:~>hg head
changeset: 202:ebee44fa159b
tag: tip
user: evocallaghan
date: Tue Nov 18 06:06:13 2008 +1100
summary: Fix KDE bugID 175420

[edward@SXCE-Workstation]:/AuroraUX/KDE4/KDE4-Testing/kde4-specs-dev:~>hg commit -m "Add Kmix support, needs testing."
[edward@SXCE-Workstation]:/AuroraUX/KDE4/KDE4-Testing/kde4-specs-dev:~>hg head
changeset: 203:cbbcb0228bf2
tag: tip
user: evocallaghan
date: Tue Nov 18 16:04:20 2008 +1100
summary: Add Kmix support, needs testing.

[edward@SXCE-Workstation]:/AuroraUX/KDE4/KDE4-Testing/kde4-specs-dev:~>uname -sv
SunOS snv_99

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Monday, November 10, 2008

Learn Ada, not C++.

Its common these days for students to learn C++ , and many apps are indeed written in C++ as a side effect of the above endless circle.

However, The truth is C++ is not all that great really.

**But why Ada..**

Over the next few blogs I am going to just throw(hehe) out a few examples and you can see for yourself.

The important thing here is to learn both before making calls on what is better for what. Clearly everything has its place. Although its good to know a little more then just past your nose ;)

Here goes...

Exception handling;

As you know exception handling consists of three components, the
exception (derr), raising the exception and handling the exception.
However, In C++ there is no exception type. When you raise an
exception you pass out any sort of type while selecting the exception
on its type. In Ada, there is a 'psuedo-type' for exceptions.

So here is some example code:

In C++

try {
 my_func();
} catch (declaration) {
 clean_up();
}

In Ada

begin
 my_func();
exception
 when ident => clean_up();
 when others => clean_up();
end;

OK, now here is a example where we call a function which we know may
raise a particular exception. Although it _may_ raise one that we
don't know about so we *must* pass everything else back up to whoever
called the function.

try {
 func_call();
} catch (const char* string_exception) {
 if(!strcmp(string_exception, "what_we_are_look_for")) {
 handle_it();
} else {
 throw;
 }
} catch (...) {
 throw;
}

OK, now in Ada:

begin
 func_call();
exception
 when what_we_are_look_for => handle_it;
 when others => raise;
end;

Yes it even looks better !

This shows how much safer the Ada version is, we know exactly what we
are waiting for and can immediately process it. In the C++ case, all we
know is that some kind of exception occured of type 'const char*' had
been raised, we must then check it still further before we can handle

it !

I will try to keep these short, so that is it for now.

Regards,

Edward O'Callaghan.

Friday, October 24, 2008

VirtualBox 2.0.4 is out !

Nothing really very interesting.. Still no USB host support for Solaris :(
When is this going to be fixed Sun ?

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog
http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

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