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I’ve recently had some cause to do some research into cell phone technologies. I need to buy a new cell phone and I’m a terrible shopper. I can’t buy anything without doing proper research. I also live near RTP where several big telecom makers are based. One of the many options i was presented when selecting a phone was the carrier technology, CDMA vs. GSM. Here is what I found to be the pros and cons of each.
I’ve been doing some research into physics engines lately. I’ve always been fascinated by physics. It started back in high school. I remember well the moment that I learned that all this weird math stuff they kept forcing on me might actually have some point. Math might actually have some relevance to the real world. I want to thank my high school physics teacher for not getting too annoyed with me every time i interrupted her with dumb questions. hehe. Anyhow, there has been a trend of the last couple years with games outsourcing major components to 3rd parties. Physics is a good example. There are a couple of interesting new things coming up that will really make PC physics simulations a lot more interesting…
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I’ve recently been working on some windows driver code amoung the many other things on my list. Oddly most of the sample code I find is in C. I began writing kernel mode (driver) code in C++ back in 1996 in VxD’s. Back then I was asking the same questions. Whats wrong with C++? It appeared to me at the time to be just another of the religious issues that programmers have to deal with on a regular basis. This of course makes me want to dig deeper.
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Continuing along the lines of giving back to the internet community, I’ve recently started working(playing) on an open source project called Taksi. (I have lots of free time it would seem). Its a desktop video recorder similar to Fraps. So instead of taking still (boring) screenshots of your work/play, you can actually record movies. It was a really great project started by Juce (Anton Jouline). Unfortunately it has not been updated in nearly 2 years. I’ve attempted to cleanup/extend the existing code. Heres my version of the sources for it so far. if you want to build your own version feel free. It does require VS 2003 and a DirectX SDK to build. For those lacking that sort of patience I also made an exe version here. Keep in mind this is alpha code.
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I’ve been doing some research on video streaming technologies on the internet. In my searches I’ve come up with some very interesting tools. There is a new open source media player called VLC Media Player created by Video Lan. Yet another player ? What’s so special about that? Well this is more than a player. It is a player, streaming server, and converter for MPEG1,2,4,DivX. It takes inputs from files, DVD, acquisition devices, hardware encoders, and satellite boxes.
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Among the hundreds of options in MS Visual studio for C++ code generation is an option to select generation of native mode SIMD or SIMD2. How safe is this to use? I’ve had some trouble finding good descriptions of exactly what these do and what CPU’s are supported.
Back in the old days we only had to worry if the CPU had a x87 co-processor or not. For a while this issue went away. Intel pulled all the x87 functionality into the 486DX, Pentium and above processors. Now it seems the problem is back.
Here’s what I found:
I’ve recently had need for a C++ library for encoding/decoding images. I did some research and found many options. I had a particular need to compress 16 bit grayscale (grayscale) images. Several formats say in documentation that they support it. The only format I could find that actually supported this is JPEG2000. Honestly I had never even heard of the format before about a year ago. But it is seems to be very slowly gaining in acceptance.
I first tried the Jasper library. Not sure if this is still being supported. But I’ve recently discovered OpenJPEG. It is fast, light, open source and seems to still be under active support/development. Check it out at OpenJPEG
I do Windows C++ development for the most part and typically use Visual Studio. I also have a minor fascination with version control systems. They are the backbone of any software development team. I’ve often found they really don’t get the attention they deserve, given their importance. I find that a little time wasted here and a little disorganization there really adds up to a lot in the scope of almost any project.
I’ve done a review of a several version control systems trying to find the best one for my needs.
My comments mostly apply to large multiple engineer projects, that have potentially many source and object modules.
NOTE: This document is not complete. I’ll try to keep filling it in as i progress.
Use the ‘more’ link below to get the rest of this!