I made a tongue-in-cheek comment to this question about making a hardware RNG. Does anyone know of any simple plans or can anyone descibe a simple hardware based RNG and the software to drive it? Go to Radio Shack. Buy a diode, an NTR resistor, a capacitor and serial cable. Cut off the end of the serial cable that does not fit ...
I am writing a .net winforms application. I want to be able to do the following... Enumerate all of the hard drives on a system. Furthermore I would love to be able to determine which of the drives is Fixed and Which is removable. Finally, of the removable drives, I would love to be able to determine which of them is a flash (SS...
We programmers are at great risk of RSI. After 10 years, I was having shoulder problems and switched to a trackball, which helped, then switched to my left hand which helped even more. I'm looking for a good finger-operated trackball with a scroll wheel. (I do not like the ones where you control the ball w/ your thumb. My thumb isn't as...
I have a Intel Quad Core CPU. If I was to develop a Winforms application which only be used on my machine (I use C# btw), how many threads can I spawn? Is there some sort of correlation between cores and the max number of threads I can have running at any one time? Would I need to find out how many threads are running at any one time a...
I am a .NET developer for a company providing managed services. This means we provide hosting, connectivity, security services, bandwidth and monitoring. As a result, the hardware stuff is not abstracted away from my daily duties. I still have to know what load balancers are, switches, firewalls, etc. I know most - not all - of this. Ev...
Are calls to Canvas.drawPath()/drawArc()/etc hardware accelerated, passed to a device native implementation or implemented in Java? Or is OpenGL the only way to achieve hardware accelerated drawing? I am trying to determine if it is feasible to use the Canvas API for realtime animation. ...
How can I retrieve a hard disk's unique ID using Java+JNI on Linux, Windows and Mac? ...
Not a repeat of the "Keyboard For Programmers" question, though that one is certainly worth reading. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/687/keyboard-for-programmers I know there are a few keyboards out there with programmable function keys, but let's say you've already found the keyboard of your dreams and it has no such feature. Ideal...
I have a C#/.Net application which seems to use most of it's CPU time doing updates to a DataGridView. I manually update the data about every 1.5 seconds, updating only the data that has changed. This ends up being about 250 updates every 1.5 seconds. I'd like to reduce that 1.5 seconds to a much smaller number (0.5 seconds maybe). I...
I need to access motheroard identification (serial, manufacture, etc) in my application on multiple processes. I have been able to successfully query this using WMI, but I'm looking for an alternative. If you care to know situation: I have some application behavior that is different depending on the hardware configuration, or if a par...
I got a RS232 signal capture device. and it working great. I need some help making sense of the data. Basically we bought it because we are dealing a late 80's machine controller that uses serial communication. We had little luck despite knowing the port parameters. From the data I dumped machine control is using the break signal as p...
I have been using my old upgraded Acer Travelmate 3273 for quite some time now since I started for my current employer. I've been using my own laptop instead of the company's standard machines because they still use Pentium 4 with only 512 MB RAM, and I just can't work on those machines. Slow and doesn't quite work well with my preferre...
I have this copied code from Example: Calling a Provider Method, it modified it now should it change CPU fan speed: #define _WIN32_DCOM #include <iostream> using namespace std; #include <comdef.h> #include <Wbemidl.h> # pragma comment(lib, "wbemuuid.lib") int main(int iArgCnt, char ** argv) { if(IsDebuggerPresent())cout<<"Debugee...
I've been in s/w programming for years. Thru out the years i also had interest in h/w programming (circuits + robotics + etc). Please advice from where i can start h/w programming. my aim is to combine both s/w & h/w to work together. ...
I frequently code numerous experiments to test various algorithms, libraries, or hardware. All code, dependencies, and output of these experiments need to be annotated and saved, so that I can return to them later. Are there good common approaches to this problem? What do you do with your experiments after running them? ...
Our in-house system is built on SQL Server 2008 with a 40-table 6NF schema. Most of the tables FK to 3 others, a key few as many as 7. The system will ultimately support 100s of employees working with 10s of 1000s of customers and store 100s of 1000s of transactional records -- prime-time access should peak at 1000 rows per second. Is...
I need a book that teaches circuit design that will be useful when programming microcontrollers. Usually when I join a project, before I can start programming any logic into the microcontroller, it needs to be integrated into a circuit with a power supply, transducer, etc. I find that I'm lacking the skills to do this myself but once the...
A couple of years ago, I remember reading about an academic project that executed a specific sequence of instructions whose effect was to cause the targeted processor to catastrophically overheat and fail, by exceeding the tolerance limits of the processor's design. It was interesting because it was the only example I've ever seen of a p...
I have an Arduino Duemilanove USB. I have just a single LED wired up to a single port on it. I want to use C# to turn on this LED. Does anyone have a simple example of how to do this? Just the most basic on/off code is what I'm looking for. On a side note, I know there are some libraries written for .NET communication with Arduino. The ...
If you had a working product that was slow and memory hungry. What would decide to do between these 2 options and why? The product would work perfectly if you buy "the" good server which would be high in the 5 digits and maybe in the 6 digits. You have the sources and the resources to change it and it would cost about the same of opt...