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• How well do free-to-open-source-projects policies work in practice?

  - by Steve314

  In comparison with an open source license and requesting donations, is a free-for-open-source-projects (or free for non-commercial developers) closed source and otherwise commercial project likely to get more license fees? Or just to alienate potential users? Assume the project has value to programmers - I'm looking for generalizations here, though specific examples comparing existing projects will be very interesting. What I have in mind involves code generating programming utilities. And one issue I can think of, either way, is a near total inability to enforce any license restrictions. After all, I can't go around the internet demanding that everyone show me their source code just in case!

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• Why isn't there a typeclass for functions?

  - by Steve314

  I already tried this on Reddit, but there's no sign of a response - maybe it's the wrong place, maybe I'm too impatient. Anyway... In a learning problem I've been messing around with, I realised I needed a typeclass for functions with operations for applying, composing etc. Reasons... It can be convenient to treat a representation of a function as if it were the function itself, so that applying the function implicitly uses an interpreter, and composing functions derives a new description. Once you have a typeclass for functions, you can have derived typeclasses for special kinds of functions - in my case, I want invertible functions. For example, functions that apply integer offsets could be represented by an ADT containing an integer. Applying those functions just means adding the integer. Composition is implemented by adding the wrapped integers. The inverse function has the integer negated. The identity function wraps zero. The constant function cannot be provided because there's no suitable representation for it. Of course it doesn't need to spell things as if it the values were genuine Haskell functions, but once I had the idea, I thought a library like that must already exist and maybe even using the standard spellings. But I can't find such a typeclass in the Haskell library. I found the Data.Function module, but there's no typeclass - just some common functions that are also available from the Prelude. So - why isn't there a typeclass for functions? Is it "just because there isn't" or "because it's not so useful as you think"? Or maybe there's a fundamental problem with the idea? The biggest possible problem I've thought of so far is that function application on actual functions would probably have to be special-cased by the compiler to avoid a looping problem - in order to apply this function I need to apply the function application function, and to do that I need to call the function application function, and to do that...

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• How do photoshop slices and layer comps interact?

  - by Steve314

  I'm interested in using Photoshop (I have CS2) for some user interface design. I was hoping to be able to use slices and layer comps to mark out particular elements, and use Javascript scripting to export multiple graphics files and text descriptions (positions and sizes of slices mainly) that will be used by my program. My problem is that I've never used Photoshop for web design, or otherwise used slices, and I'm not confident that I understand how they interact with layer comps. This is what I believe (and hope) is correct... Manual slices aren't affected by layer comps in any way - they aren't saved as part of a layer comp. The same manual slices will be active irrespective of which layer comp is selected. Layer-based slices aren't directly affected by layer comps, but they are indirectly affected in that the layer comp saves details of layer position and style. Thus selecting a layer comp may move a layer and change its style, affecting the location and size of its layer-based slice, or may effectively disable the slice by hiding the layer. Automatic slices aren't directly affected by layer comps, but are indirectly affected due to changes to the layer-based slices. So, layer based slices (which are my main interest) may move, may change size (to accomodate a style such as a drop shadow), and may be effectively disabled by the layer being hidden. Other details (and all details of manual slices) will remain constant irrespective of which layer comp is active. Is that correct?

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• How to diagnose occasional sudden resets?

  - by steve314

  I have a Windows XP system, and have recently upgraded by adding 2 1GB sticks of RAM to the 2x0.5GB already present. Since then, about once per day (the system is used 8+ hours per day), the system has suddenly and unexpectedly reset. On a couple of occasions, the system has frozen completely, only responding to the power button being held in for several seconds to force power off. Nothing at all ever appears in the system event log that might indicate a possible cause - everything seems to suggest business as usual. Sounds like faulty memory - but memtest86+ says otherwise. A full test, taking over an hour, found no issues. The next likely suspicion, then, is that I've knocked something while installing the RAM. Trouble is, everything I can think of to test seems fine. I've opened up the case and prodded a few things around, hoping to get better contact on connections etc, but there's no sign yet as to whether that has made a difference or not. I thought about a malware-related timing fluke, but again, so far as I can tell I'm all clear. All I can think of to add to my checklist (mainly of things that I can't easily check) is... The power supply is (1) only 350W, (2) not necessarily the best quality, and (3) powering a Prescott P4 640 3.2GHz. Could that be borderline overloaded or about to die? How do I check? Is it possible that the CPU isn't getting cooled properly? I haven't had the fan past normal tickover even doing video encoding, and the only sane temperature reading from SpeedFan is pretty steady at 36 celcius, so probably not. Any thoughts? Is there a standard procedure for diagnosing this kind of fault?

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• What are the most likely bottlenecks determining the performance of CamStudio screen recording?

  - by Steve314

  When doing screen recording, I can get a frame rate of maybe 15 frames per second for the full screen on my 1080p monitor using the XVID codec. I can increase the speed a bit by recording a region, changing screen modes, and tweaking other settings, but I'm curious what hardware upgrades might give me the biggest bang for my buck. My PC is budget, but modern... Athlon 2 X4 645 (3.1GHz, quad core, limited cache) processor. 4GB single channel DDR3 1066 RAM. ASRock motherboard with NVidia GeForce 7025/nForce 630a Chipset. ATI Radeon HD 5450 graphics card - 512MB on board, not configured to steal system RAM. I dual-boot Windows XP and Windows 7. For the moment, XP is my bigger performance concern as it's still my getting-things-done O/S as opposed to my browser-host O/S. My goal is to make a few programming-related tutorials. For a lot of that I don't need screen recording - I can make up some slides, record audio with the PC switched off, yada yada. When I do need screen recording, I'll mostly be recording Notepad++, Visual Studio or a command prompt. Occasionally, I may be recording some kind of graphics or diagram program and using my pre-Bamboo cheap Wacom tablet - I have the CS2 versions of Photoshop and Illustrator, but I'd much more likely be using Microsoft Paint. Basically, what I'll be recording won't be making huge demands on the machine - but recording a fair number of pixels (720p preferred) will be useful. What's particularly wierd - not so long ago I still had a five-year-old Pentium 4 based PC. And (with the same 1080p monitor) it could record at not far from the same frame rate. So clearly the performance issues are more subtle than just throw-money-at-it. My first guess would be that the main bottleneck is the bandwidth for transferring data to/from the graphics card. Is that likely to be correct? In support of that, see this [Radeon HD 5450 review][1] - the memory bandwidth is only 12.8 GB/s. If you can't get data out of graphics memory quickly, you can't transfer it back to the system memory quickly. Apparently, that's slower than some top-end cards in 2002.

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• Where can I find a description of the old British Standard structured flow charts?

  - by Steve314

  Some professional organisation defined these in, IIRC, the early 80s as similar to the more well known flow charts, but "structured". Instead of having arbitrary "goto" arrows, they had the equivalent of loops etc. They were standardized, and I vaguely remember studying them briefly at O Level. Of course they were about as useful as the well-known chocolate teapot, but I'd still like to be able to find a reference guide for them if possible - for roughly the same reason I was looking for a reference for standard Basic a while back. Google tells me - well, nothing really. They may as well never have existed. Which is probably nearly (and perhaps completely) true - I certainly never heard of them anywhere else except when I was at school. There's a chance that they may even be my computer science teachers little joke.

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• Where can I find a quick reference for standard Basic?

  - by Steve314

  The reason? Pure nostalgia. Anyway, there was a standard for Basic that was published in the late 80s or early 90s. It was probably ISO/IEC 10279:1991, but I don't have access to that and cannot be sure. Whatever this standard was, some of the syntax made its way into Borlands Turbo Basic and Microsofts Visual Basic. I never learned any significant amount of VB, but Turbo Basic is one of those things I played with in my mis-spent youth. At one time, my main reference was an article published in one of the main programming periodicals - maybe Personal Computer World, maybe Byte. A scan of that article (if anyone can even identify it) would be great, but all I really want is a few pages quick reference of that standard syntax. Must be free (I'm not that nostalgic), but it must describe the standard syntax - the whole point is to sort out what is standard as opposed to VB or whatever. EDIT The more I think about this, the more convinced I am that this standard was available around 1987 or 1988. Maybe it was the earlier non-full version of the standard above, or maybe it was pre-acceptance of the standard.

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• How to build LLVM using GCC 4 on Windows?

  - by Steve314

  I have been able to build LLVM 2.6 (the llvm-2.6.tar.gz package) using MinGW GCC 3.4.5. I haven't tested properly, but it seems to work. The trouble is, I have libraries of my own which don't build using GCC3, but which work fine in GCC4 (template issues). I believe the first official GCC4 version for MinGW is GCC 4.4.0. EDIT Decluttered - everything useful in the "tried this tried that" info is now in the answer. EDIT Most of this question/answer is redundant with LLVM 2.7 - the standard configure, make routine works fine in MinGW with no hacks or workarounds.

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• Is there a good digraph layout library callable from C++?

  - by Steve314

  The digraphs represent finite automata. Up until now my test program has been writing out dot files for testing. This is pretty good both for regression testing (keep the verified output files in subversion, ask it if there has been a change) and for visualisation. However, there are some problems... Basically, I want something callable from C++ and which plans a layout for my states and transitions but leaves the drawing to me - something that will allow me to draw things however I want and draw on GUI (wxWidgets) windows. I also want a license which will allow commercial use - I don't need that at present, and I may very well release as open source, but I don't want to limit my options ATM. The problems with GraphViz are (1) the warnings about building from source on Windows, (2) all the unnecessary dependencies for rendering and parsing, and (3) the (presumed) lack of a documented API specifically and purely for layout. Basically, I want to be able to specify my states (with bounding rectangle sizes) and transitions, and read out positions for the states and waypoints for each transition, then draw based on those co-ordinates myself. I haven't really figured out how annotations on transitions should be handled, but there should be some kind of provision for specifying bounding-box-sizes for those, associating them with transitions, and reading out positions. Does anyone know of a library that can handle those requirements? I'm not necessarily against implementing something for myself, but in this case I'd rather avoid it if possible.

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• Are indivisible operations still indivisible on multiprocessor and multicore systems?

  - by Steve314

  As per the title, plus what are the limitations and gotchas. For example, on x86 processors, alignment for most data types is optional - an optimisation rather than a requirement. That means that a pointer may be stored at an unaligned address, which in turn means that pointer might be split over a cache page boundary. Obviously this could be done if you work hard enough on any processor (picking out particular bytes etc), but not in a way where you'd still expect the write operation to be indivisible. I seriously doubt that a multicore processor can ensure that other cores can guarantee a consistent all-before or all-after view of a written pointer in this unaligned-write-crossing-a-page-boundary situation. Am I right? And are there any similar gotchas I haven't thought of?

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• Is the size of a struct required to be an exact multiple of the alignment of that struct?

  - by Steve314

  Once again, I'm questioning a longstanding belief. Until today, I believed that the alignment of the following struct would normally be 4 and the size would normally be 5... struct example { int m_Assume_32_Bits; char m_Assume_8_Bit_Bytes; }; Because of this assumption, I have data structure code that uses offsetof to determine the distance in bytes between two adjacent items in an array. Today, I spotted some old code that was using sizeof where it shouldn't, couldn't understand why I hadn't had bugs from it, coded up a unit test - and the test surprised me by passing. A bit of investigation showed that the sizeof the type I used for the test (similar to the struct above) was an exact multiple of the alignment - ie 8 bytes. It had padding after the final member. Here is an example of why I never expected this... struct example2 { example m_Example; char m_Why_Cant_This_Be_At_Offset_6_Bytes; }; A bit of Googling showed examples that make it clear that this padding after the final member is allowed - for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_structure_alignment#Data_structure_padding (the "or at the end of the structure" bit). This is a bit embarrassing, as I recently posted this comment - Use of struct padding (my first comment to that answer). What I can't seem to determine is whether this padding to an exact multiple of the alignment is guaranteed by the C++ standard, or whether it is just something that is permitted and that some (but maybe not all) compilers do. So - is the size of a struct required to be an exact multiple of the alignment of that struct according to the C++ standard? If the C standard makes different guarantees, I'm interested in that too, but the focus is on C++.

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