I'm working on a software project intended for recuperating old specific hardware, mostly for non-for-profit organizations and poor schools. I need a way to simulate old hardware so I can test the application before shipping it out. How can I do this? ...
Here is our situation. Our software has an option to print cards (credit card sized ID cards). We have various options to set transparencies of images, different fonts, colors, and just a bunch of stuff to make the cards look pretty. The problem seems to be that not every card printer really functions the same with the same set of parame...
All the projects I work interface to a piece of hardware and this is often the main purpose of the software. Are there any effective ways I can apply TDD to the code that works with the hardware? Update: Sorry for not being clearer with my question. The hardware I use is a frame grabber that capture images from a camera. I then process...
Hello, I am not a developer, but I think that my question is interesting enough (and I am desperate enough) to post here on stackoverflow My company uses a program written in C# to drive a kiosk PC that uses .Net 2.0 SP1 and a USB signature pad. The signature pad is a HID that uses the generic Microsoft HID driver. We tried to install...
I see that a number of people are doing S/W development (not just Delphi) using a virtual machine to host the IDE and all required files. I've used Microsoft Virtual PC to debug issues with my Applications on various OS's but with little access 'outside' the VM. My applications use USB, serial and - crucially - direct I/O writes to hardw...
I'm writing firmware in C for an embedded processor. I want to have all the configuration information in one header file called config.h. This is causing problems with the ADC initialization, where simple #defines won't do the trick. Right now the code is like so: config.h #define NUMBER_OF_POTS 1 #define POT_1_CHANNEL 27 adc.c #d...
I have an idea of how interrupts are handled by a dual core CPU. I was wondering about how interrupt handling is implemented on a board with more than one physical processor. Is any of the interrupt responsibility determined by the physical board's configuration? Each processor must be able to handle some types of interrupts, like di...
And here we go with my first not-directly-programming-related question on SO! I seem to suffer from an excessive amount of static buildup (the electrical kind, not the type modifier). This, of course, manifests itself as getting the crap shocked out of me pretty much any time that I touch anything that even thinks it's grounded. No kidd...
Hi guys, could some one help me out trying to understand how hard drive seeking works. I have a small binary database file which read performance is absolutely essential. If I need to skip a few bytes in the file is it quicker to use seek() or to read() then discard the unwanted data. If the average seek time of a hard drive is 10ms an...
On a desktop one can easily look at the jumpers. The same is not true for laptops and it would be useful to determine how a drive is connected if one wants to replace it. Any ideas of how to do this, or even whether it is possible? Intended platform is Windows (either XP or Vista). Recent experience is with a Toshiba A50 laptop where ...
I am usually renting dedicated servers under Windows Server 2003/2008. Those servers are said to be "hardware RAID1"; yet I am wondering how can I verify this property of the server remotely? As far I can see, disks appears as classical IDE disk from the windows disk manager, and it does not tell me anything about the RAID properties o...
What's the difference between 2*512 KB L2 cache and 1 MB L2 cache? ...
I'm setting up a complete .NET development environment on my Macbook Pro. I'm using Visual Studio 08 team suite, SQL server 2008, MS Office and other tools (like FinalBuilder, RegexBuddy, Beyond Compare). How big should my windows 7 (beta currently) partition be? Will 100GB be enough? NOTE: I wasn't sure if this was programming relate...
Suddenly, I am made to look into some verilog testbench code which heavily uses $readmemh, and $writememh. I understood that it basically read to memory and write to memory. I will be happy if you can point to some resources related to those routines. PS: I searched in google for no success. (I am very ... very new to Verilog) ...
I am doing some sourcing and have just realized that I am having trouble googling out any meaningful results on Hardware based HTTP Proxy Servers. It got me thinking whether there are any good Hardware based Proxy Servers for Office and/or Home use. My Questions is which are the known good Hardware Based HTTP Proxy Servers in production...
On most newer computers you can shutdown the hard way by pressing the power button for a couple of seconds. But I want to prevent this completely. You're able to prevent some soft events like the sleep, suspend, hibernate and "Press power button" events in Windows control panel; you can also use some Win32 and WDI programming to catch a...
I was wondering how many people here use Windows Server 2008 (or w2k3) as their development machine. If you do, what are the pros/cons that you've found? If you don't, do you see any advantages to doing so? I've read many anecdotes online stating that it was a more stable development environment than Vista SP1, and some setup tips her...
I'm sure it repeats everywhere. You can 'feel' network is slow, or machine or slow or something. But the server/chassis logs are not showing anything, so IT doesn't believe you. What do you do? Your regressions are taking twice the time ... but that's not enough Okay you transfer 100 GB using dd etc, but ... that's not enough. Okay yo...
I am assigned with the task of verifying some verilog based RTL code. Now, coding the RTL testbench using verilog seems to be very difficult (for me). So I would like to try one of the following. - Try providing a PLI interface to the RTL and thereby invoke 'C functions for testing - Using system 'C for interfacing the 'C functions PS: ...
I am looking for affordable solutions that generate true random numbers. I have found LavaRnd, which is a cryptographically sound random number generator. Does anybody has experience in this field and/or knows about other solutions? PS: IMHO the SO question True random number generator did not really cover this EDIT: My curiosity i...