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This is the last entry of this blog; I will come back soon with a new site, with a new look and feel and new contents. Thanks to all of you for your support, comments and suggestions! This blog will remain at this URL for reference purposes (particularly regarding the popular Ubuntu entries!).

Of course, I wanted to use my good' old Linksys WPC54GS Wireless-G Network Adapter with Broadcom chipset, and I was lucky enough to find this page:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx?action=show&redirect=WifiDocs%2FDriver%2FBroadcom43xx#head-e70dd6b5c57894d32e3eddc4f3e21d7d6d02230f

It describes the whole Broadcom problem in Ubuntu, and gives the instructions needed to make the card work in Dapper:

1. Follow the instructions in http://www.kosmaczewski.net/blogs/tech/archives/2006/02/how_to_install_1.php from steps 1 to 7 (step 8 cannot be done, yet)
2. Type "echo 'blacklist bcm43xx' | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist"
3. Type "sudo rmmod bcm43xx",
   "sudo rmmod ndiswrapper" and
   "sudo modprobe ndiswrapper"
4. Do the step 8 of http://www.kosmaczewski.net/blogs/tech/archives/2006/02/how_to_install_1.php

And that's it! You've got the wireless card ready for use.

:) I'm happy to have found that page! It seems that the Broadcom drivers that come with Dapper do not work with all concerned wireless cards, so the thing is to "blacklist" them, and then to load ndiswrapper that works perfectly well.

In the February 2006 issue of MSDN Magazine (http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/), Matt Neely describes a .NET implementation of mobile agents:

"The term agent originates in artificial intelligence and describes a logical entity that has some level of autonomy within its environment or host. A mobile agent has the added capability to move between hosts. In a computing context, a mobile agent is a combined unit of data and code that can move between different execution environments."

The idea described in the article is that of a small family of .NET classes that literally "jump" from a computer to another, performing tasks in the host computer, through a mechanism called Remoting:

"An example of a traveling agent app could perform operations control. An agent is sent out with a list of machines on the local network it should traverse to inventory hardware and software (...) built-in services that facilitate the componentization and mobility of code, namely object remoting and serialization.(...) Mobile agents have their uses and their pros and cons. The autonomous and mobile nature of mobile agents can lead to reduced network traffic, decentralization, increased robustness and fault-tolerance, and easy deployment."

(Source: Neely, 2006)

Enjoy! :)

A Case for Compilers

Adrian Kosmaczewski

Download a Postscript or PDF version of this paper.
Download all the files for this paper as a gzipped tar archive.

Abstract

In computer science, to say that one approach is "better" than another is to miss a great detail: I do not think that there are "better" or "natural" paradigms per se, but just apppropriate answers to certain problems in a given context.

In his 1962 book "The Structure of Nature Revolutions", Thomas Kuhn introduces the idea of the "paradigm shift"; following this idea, human knowledge does not evolve gradually, but rather in discontinuous jumps, called "paradigm shifts" or "scientific revolutions":

"A scientific revolution occurs, according to Kuhn, when scientists encounter anomalies which cannot be explained by the universally accepted paradigm within which scientific progress has thereto been made. The paradigm, in Kuhn's view, is not simply the current theory, but the entire worldview in which it exists, and all of the implications which come with it. There are anomalies for all paradigms, Kuhn maintained, that are brushed away as acceptable levels of error, or simply ignored and not dealt with (a principal argument Kuhn uses to reject Karl Popper's model of falsifiability as the key force involved in scientific change)."

(Wikipedia, 2006)

In the case of the activity of software engineering, the paradigm shift from procedural to object-orientation is quite evident, both historically and technically speaking.

I have been working as a software developer since 1996, and as such I've used a variety of different languages, both compiled and interpreted. But the who languages that I know and use most today, are two somewhat different ones, C# and Ruby. I will begin my presentation with a short explanation of both, providing their major similarities and differences, and then providing some code samples of both.

Both languages are ranked #7 and #21 respectively in the TIOBE Programming Community Index, as of February 2006 (http://www.tiobe.com/tpci.htm).

• A204 - SharePoint Workflow (zipped, 6.5 MB)
• D308 - LINQ (zipped, 6.7 MB)

BTW, they are in French... and yes, the slide with Maradona on it is maybe the most important of them all :))

Wrong.

Well, let me introduce you Microsoft Catering Services (aka Service Pack for human beings, or the Microsoft Stomach Update Services):

"The true operating system is the net itself"

This phrase, common marketing argument in the late nineties, made me remind that in the eighties, Sun Microsystems' founder, Scott McNealy, used the slogan "The Network is the Computer" to describe his vision:

Source: http://www.csg.is.titech.ac.jp/~mich/photos/visitsun/13/full/13004.jpg

But, can we safely mix both concepts?

The question is: would it be useful if in hardware, each cell of data would carry its own type designation? I will discuss here the pros and cons of this approach, in respect to hardware and software architectures.