The Great Geek Manual News

Nvidia has released a Mac OS X version of its CUDA programming tools. Nvidia’s CUDA tools help developers utilize the GPUs on newer Nvidia graphics hardware as parallel processing engines.

CUDA, or Compute Unified Device Architecture, lets programmers utilize a dedicated driver written using C language subroutines to offload data processing to the graphics processing hardware found on Nvidia’s late-model GeForce graphics hardware. The software lets programmers use the cards to process data other than just graphics, without having to learn OpenGL or how to talk with the card specifically.

Supported hardware includes the GeForce 8800GT and Quadro graphics cards that are available as configure-to-order options on the Mac Pro and the new GeForce 8600M graphics chip found in Apple’s recently refreshed MacBook Pro. The technology is specific to Nvidia graphics systems and doesn’t work either with the ATI or Intel integrated graphics hardware found on other Mac models.

While adding support for CUDA into an application is a relatively simple process, Andy Keane, general manager of Nvidia’s GPU computing business, explained that how CUDA tools can actually assist the application becomes, as he put it, “more of a computer science problem.”

Read the Entire Story…
Source: Macworld via Yahoo! News

The Perl Foundation has released Perl 5.10, the first new version in five years of a programming language with an emphasis on rough-and-ready practicality over syntactical formality.

The new version has some features designed to make programming a notch easier, according to the announcement last week. Among those features is a “say” command that eases some text-output chores, a “switch” operator to send a program in various directions depending on different situations, and improvements to the all-important “regular expression” methods for handling text. The Perl interpreter, which runs Perl programs, also is faster and requires less memory, the foundation said.

The official list of changes is available at the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network.

Perl programmers, meanwhile, are working on two future versions, 5.12 and Perl 6.0. Neither has a due date, said foundation spokesman Andy Lester.

“Perl 5 and Perl 6 will stay in dual development. Perl 5 has such a huge installed base, it won’t be going away any time soon after Perl,” he said.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: CNet

San Francisco (InfoWorld) - Microsoft plans to integrate F#, a functional programming language developed by the Microsoft Research group, into its Visual Studio application development platform, said S. “Soma” Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division, in his blog.

The company, however, has not laid out a formal release schedule, although Somasegar pledged to both integrate F# into Visual Studio and continue evolving it.

Pronounced “F sharp,” F# is based on the concepts of functional programming, Somasegar said. Functional languages treat computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions. The mathematical slant of functional programming is appealing to professionals in domains described with mathematical notation, including financial, scientific, and technical computing, said Somasegar.

F# combines type safety, performance, and scripting with the advantages of running on a on a modern runtime, Microsoft Research said. It supports interactive scripting like Python and the strong type inference and safety of ML. F# can access.Net libraries and database tools.

Bloggers corresponding about F# on the hubFS blog had positive responses to Microsoft’s plans.

“I can’t overstate how excited I am by this news,” one blogger said.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: InfoWorld via Yahoo News

Second acts are rare in the computer industry but Jean Ichbiah, who died this week, managed it. Not only did he revolutionise software development for military computer systems with the Ada programming language, but he also devised a widely-used fast text-entry system for handheld computers.

Ichbiah was an atypical programming pioneer in many ways. At a time when it was becoming fashionable for programmers to wear their hair long and sport polo shirts and sandals, Ichbiah opted for neatly trimmed hair and stylish suits. I met him in 1979 just after his team at CII Honeywell Bull had won the Ada contract and, having no idea what he looked like, thought the smart, unassuming gentleman who greeted me in the lobby of a London Hotel was the public relations officer. Fortunately, I managed to conceal my surprise as it became evident that this was the man I had come to interview.

Given the complexity of negotiating with bureaucracy at the US Department of Defense (DoD), Ada’s inventor needed to be a consummate diplomat and Ichbiah combined his undoubted technical skill with a master’s degree in diplomacy. Even if he had realised I had mis-identified him, he was far too much of a gentleman to mention it.

Ada went on to change the way the US military - and the rest of NATO - built embedded computer systems. More importantly, in 10 years Ada usage is reckoned to have slashed the number of high level languages used by the DoD by a order of magnitude.

Ichbiah went on to found first Alsys - an Ada compiler development company - and, later, Textware - a company which develops text entry software for personal digital assistants (PDA).

He was awarded the French Légion d’Honneur and a Certificate of Distinguished Service from the DoD for his work on Ada. He was also a member of the French Academy of Sciences.

Source: The Register

A team of AJAX experts is working on a new capability to enable Web applications to work offline.

Brad Neuberg, a San Francisco-based software architect and programmer, said that he, along with the support of some developers at SitePen, of Palo Alto, Calif., is working on the Dojo Offline Toolkit, a small, cross-platform, generic download that allows Web applications to work offline. The tool kit is based on the popular Dojo Toolkit, an Asynchronous JavaScript and XML development system maintained by the Dojo Foundation. Major companies such as IBM and Sun Microsystems are members of the Dojo Foundation.

“I had been prototyping and playing with some ideas around bringing true offline access to Web applications in a simple, generic way,” Neuberg said.

To accomplish his goals, Neuberg said he will be working for the next three months “on bringing the Dojo Offline Toolkit from the drawing board to reality.”

The tool kit will be an open-source library that brings true, offline access to Web applications, where “users will be able to access their Web applications and work with their data even if no network connection is available, just like desktop applications,” Neuberg said.

Dojo Offline Toolkit will use a simple, small Web proxy that runs locally. The proxy will cache files that need to cached for later access without hitting the network, Neuberg said.

In addition, to enable the browser to talk to the local Web proxy, the new tool kit will use a standard technology known as PAC (Proxy AutoConfiguration). A PAC file is a small bit of JavaScript that is invoked on each browser request.

With the Dojo Offline Toolkit, the Web browser does not know if the user is online or offline, since the proxy serves up the user interface either way, Neuberg said.

The last step of the process is to wrap the Dojo Offline Toolkit into a small installer for each target platform and to have it start up silently on system startup, Neuberg said.

Read the Entire Story…
Source: eWeek

An attempt is being made to quickly patch flaws in Apple software that are announced by vulnerability researchers Kevin Finisterre and LMH this month. The researchers’ ‘Month of Apple Bugs’ project, launched on Monday, promises to feature a new Apple software bug for each day in January. However, Landon Fuller, a senior open-source developer with extensive experience working for Apple, says he is attempting to offer fixes for each flaw found.

Keep up to Date at Fuller’s Blog…
Read the Entire Story…
Source: ZDNet

D is a systems programming language. Its focus is on combining the power and high performance of C and C++ with the programmer productivity of modern languages like Ruby and Python. Special attention is given to the needs of quality assurance, documentation, management, portability and reliability. D is statically typed, and compiles direct to native code. It’s multiparadigm: supporting imperative, object oriented, and template metaprogramming styles. It’s a member of the C syntax family, and its look and feel is very close to C++’s. See a comparison of D with C, C++, C#, and Java.

Read more …
Source: Digital Mars and Slashdot

Blogger’s Note: Hackers everywhere salivate …