That is a problem I'm facing right now. I need to specify the hardware that will run my piece of software. The thing is: the project isn't finished yet, and I need it running in "real" conditions before I can go on, conditions which I cannot reproduce at home; what I can test at home barely scratches them. We don't have much money to spe...
How often do you upgrade your development PC? I upgrade mine every 3 years or so. I'm just curious. Do you upgrade when you find your computer slowing or for other reasons? ...
I've got a few hundred computers running an app. On one computer, I've seen two instances of a single bit being incorrectly set on some strings that I pull out of SQLite. If this was my dev computer I would assume I have a bug somewhere, but there is certainly some number of installations at which point I'll start seeing rare hardware ...
Since programming is essentially hardware interpretation. Are there any books or articles on CPU's or other hardware components that can help in understanding low level programming languages? Or even hardware books or articles that target programmers? ...
Why is it that advertised disk space is almost always higher than the disk space reported by the UI? For example, I have an "80 gb" hard drive, but the iTunes UI indicates only 74. I usually see this as well with hard disks and the amount reported with the drive letter. ...
For doing prototyping on small embedded projects that require physical motion, what hardware prototyping tools are available? For my projects, I tend to spend more time finding parts (i.e. wood, aluminum, etc.) and making the proper cuts, measurements, and connections than writing the software and configuring the electrical hardware. ...
What is the recommended hardware specifications to support full text search in SQL 2005? We are looking to go in production and I want to make sure the current hardware can accommodate it. To provide the context, We are expecting 2 - 3 million records to be searched by small subset of our users(probably in 100s).The user has the optio...
Simple question really, I would like to learn some cocoa, primarily for playing around with the Iphone SDK, but first i need a mac. Macs are expensive, but I don't know at what point an old mac moves from a bargain to a doorstop. How cheap and old can I go to have an ok mac development machine? Is there any other way to have a good de...
Several people round here recommended switching to the new WD Velociraptor 10000rpm harddisk. Also magazine articles praise the performance. I bought one and mirrored my old system to it. The resulting increase in compilation-speed is somewhat disappointing: On my old Samsung drive (SATA, 7200), the compilation time was 16:02. On the ...
A student of mine came to me this morning and asked for some ideas for an embedded systems (ideally hardware+software design) project to be completed in the next 6 months or so. He's a freshman, and inexperienced, but has the motivation to learn if pointed in the right direction. The purpose of completing this project, besides getting ...
As programmers, we've all put together a really cool program or pieced together some hardware in an interesting way to solve a problem. Today I was thinking about those hacks and how some of them are deprecated by modern technology (for example, you no longer need to hack your Tivo to add a network port). In the software world, we take t...
I am working on a project that does a large amount of hashing, signing, and both asymmetric and symmetric encryption. Since these steps have a significant effect on our performance and available load, I was wondering if there is a hardware based solution to offloading the work. I have done some surfing to find out, and the only items I...
I have two keyboards connected to my PC, is there any way to know what keyboard a key was pressed on in any language or framework? ...
I want to add the option of automatic port forwarding (NAT Traversal) to an application. I know this can be done using UPnP (specifically the part that communicates with the device presenting itself as an IGD - Internet Gateway Device). I need to be able to test this port forwarding feature while developing it. And whatever big router ...
In the documentation of hardware that allows us to control it via UDP/IP, I found the following fragment: In this communication protocol, DWORD is a 4 bytes data, WORD is a 2 bytes data, BYTE is a single byte data. The storage format is little endian, namely 4 bytes (32bits) data is stored as: d7-d0, d15-d8, d23-d16, d31-d24; doubl...
I've always thought that a dual screen setup is sufficient for application development. One screen for the code and one for documentation/testing. In some cases I could see another pc with one screen to be useful for testing in a different environment. Then I saw this. I'm not sure what to do with so many screens but I'm still a bit env...
How do you extract an HD and Bios Unique ID, using python script? ...
I know that it is possible to check how much physical RAM is installed using GetPhysicallyInstalledSystemMemory or how much ram the operating system can see using GlobalMemoryStatusEx. However, I am wondering if there is any way to check how much ram a user has installed by slot. That is, to be able to programmatically tell the differe...
Given my background as a generalist, I can cover much of the area from analog electronics to writing simple applications that interface to a RDBMS backend. I currently work in a company that develops hardware to solve industry-specific problems. We have an experienced programmer that have written business apps, video games, and a whole...
I'm writing a specification document for a whizz-bang Web 2.0 application, and I want to make sure that the client is not mislead into thinking that the jQuery animation / AJAX bits will be smooth for any visitor on their dodgy old DX-66. I considered taking the Firefox 3 requirements (Pentium 500MHz, 128MB RAM) but that isn't going to ...