No doubt about it, people in developed countries are getting older and older. Case in point: The number of knee replacements in the U.S. grew from 257,000 in 1998 to 455,000 in 2004. Since doctors rarely perform knee replacements on patients under 50, those numbers can reflect only one thing: an aging and progressively nonambulatory population.  Continue Reading >>

The gateway of my home network, is not one of those “broadband router”. Instead, it’s an old Pentium 200Hz machine in my basement, running, of cause, QNX. Why am I doing this? I think it’s one of those “because I can” thing. Since I compiled my own TCPIP stack, I can really know every detail of the packets [...]  Continue Reading >>

There, I said it. I've just been reading a great paper by Charles Mann called "Why Software is so Bad". There's various reasons given such as poor design practices, increasing pressure to deliver on time with more features, lack of customer understanding and confusing and conflicting priorities, requirements, goals, objective, you name it. Two quotes that I really like from this paper are
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Recently, companies like Intel and Harman have been using QNX technology to demonstrate the slick graphics capabilities of their new products. Take, for example, this 3D navigation system, which runs on the Intel Atom and which uses QNX’s implementation of the OpenGL ES 3D API:  Continue Reading >>

I think the day has come for developers of all kinds to start using static analysis tools. I am biased, of course, because I used to be a product manager at Klocwork, one of the leading vendors of these tools. Other companies worth noting in this field are Coverity, Grammatech, PolySpace, and Gimpel. Static analysis refers to tools that analyze source code "statically" meaning the code is analyzed on a host/server before compilation. The latest generation of these tools can do more than syntactical analysis, they can actually try to predict runtime code paths and look for real errors such as bad pointer deferences or array out of bounds errors. Static analaysis has advantages over it's runtime counterpart since a complete or running system is not required for analysis and it can analyze all possible code paths - something that is very difficult to do with traditional testing methods.
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Pin a world map to your wall, put on a blindfold, and throw a dart at the map. Grab a shortwave radio and take a plane to wherever the dart landed. Switch on the radio and start twiddling with the tuner. Chances are, you’ll pick up China Radio International (CRI).  Continue Reading >>

At long last, the dtrace project at Foundry27 is public. It’s really still in the formative stages, but if you want to download the source and hack around a bit, or even just laugh at the dirty hacks, feel free! I’m slowing working on a more thorough port, but the prototype is a nice forum [...]  Continue Reading >>

Global warming? I’m still not convinced. Biofuels? Pure marketing. Organic foods? Healthy, especially for the companies who make money selling them.
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If you’ve ever taken a kernel trace of an application starting up on a kernel that is 6.3.2 or later, you might have noticed a stage in your application called STATE_WAITPAGE. To understand what is going on here, we have to first look at mmap() and how it allocates and initializes memory. When you allocate memory with [...]  Continue Reading >>

QNX-based systems perform eye surgery, control air traffic, monitor nuclear power plants, and keep 9-1-1 systems running 24/7. Heck, they even control touchless car washes. But did you know that QNX can also play a wicked game of checkers? Check out the video here. (Hint: Skip the intro and fast-forward to the 00:40 mark.)  Continue Reading >>