Meeting Notes April 2008
About 7-8 people came to this meeting.
Scripting Languages:
We started the discussion talking about scripting languages. Dustin uses Perl for his Amanda project at work. He went in some detail on how they used the scripting language to run a bunch of different processes and encapsulates some of it in C. I mentioned that I had heard a presentation from Guido van Rossum, who wrote Python. Guido at the time seemed to believe that all scripting languages provide a similar function. Guido also said that many times scripting languages work for small projects but get unmanageable as the lines of code get too long. It seemed as if Amanda might be too big of a project for a scripting language.
Running Linux on Windows:
Marc said he had a new job which we all congratulated him on. However at his job, he is currently using a Windows box and feels like a fish out of water. To make him more at home, we recommended some virtual Linux clients. Vmware is the simplest if you have root access to the windows machine however there are others. Dave said there is Ted/Extend, which is very old. There is cygwin and hummingbird’s exceed which all could be used to create a Linux environment in Windows.
Complier issues:
According to Dave, the Intel Compiler is capable of optimizing code to zero. This means that a program a few hundred lines could be optimized to nothing. It appears new compliers are smarter than the programmer. If the compiler finds functions that do not return results to the main program, they can get optimized out. There are ways around this. The simplest way around it is write code that always returns something to main. Additionally, there are special ways for telling a compiler not optimize the code with special identifiers in the code.
Programming questions:
Dustin asked if anyone was familiar with the Splice in C. Dave explained how it worked, but I could not find any links to it on Google searches.
Windows 7:
Dustin and some others said that Windows 7 is coming out. It was an off topic discussion, but kind of fun.
It appears a lot of people are pretty disappointed with Windows Vista. Most gamers hate Vista according to what
Dustin read online.
MRE Eastport:
Dustin, who is not originally from Annapolis, mentioned he was part of the Easport MRE.
I was ignorant of the Eastport MRE, so he helped educate me. It appears that when the bridge was off line some time in the past, Eastport succeeded from Annapolis. Even though Eastport is part of Annapolis they celebrate this with drinking in March of every year.