Archive for July, 2005

Bizarre bugs strike again ! Ok so today when I stepped into a simple constructor call (something like new GeoNode(); ), the XCode debugger instead of going directly in the constructor code it stepped into some __dyld_*** functions (no source code available), then crashed. It never reached the called constructor. In the end, I realized that Mac OS X loads the compiled code lazily – and thus checks for linking errors at run-time!.

I had a quick look on how Visual Studio 2005 helps testing the projects – it’s really nice, a test project is generated that instantiates your class and verifies the methods (well, you have to write code to compute the expected value, for example). There are lots of functions to organize the test sessions and you can use metadata files for defining input values to tests. As you know, unit tests are very important in XP, you have to write the unit test first and then implement the class, so programmers are encouraged to use the IDE functions.

So nVidia launched their latest graphic card, not a revolutionary one at all (unlike their statement that is a revolutionary new architecture built from the ground up) but rather a 6800 Ultra with 8 pipelines more and a few new features (like the Trasnparency Supersampling that surely is cool). ATI will strike back in the next few weeks with the chip codenamed R520 (most likely to be named Radeon X900) – we expect really cool new features and advanced performance for it. ATI needs to get the crown back, the Geforce 6 Series really proved it was better in every aspect (well not quite as the R300 – nVidia FX difference but still).

Is developed by Nokia and Apple together, using open-source code also used in Safari. Let’s hope it will be backwards-compatible with the existing S60 phones and won’t be used only in the new products.