programming

Recently, the Mozilla Firefox build interface, aka mach, was enhanced with a great feature for Windows developers: the ability to generate Visual Studio project files. Such project files are not maintained in mozilla-central, hence the need for a way to generate them. Thanks to the awesome work done by Gregory Szorc, generating project files using mach is as simple as issuing the following command: [bash] ./mach build-backend backend=VisualStudio [/bash] The solution file will be available in your object directory, under the msvc folder (i....

Lately I’ve started contributing to Mozilla Firefox with some patches (yay! It’s an awesome project… consider contributing 😉 ). It was a good excuse to practice with Mercurial, the distributed revision control software used by Mozilla. I’m mainly a Git user and I have to admit I was a little puzzled at first and had to adapt to the new workflow. In this article I will try to answer some of the questions I had during my learning phase....

I’m having a lot of fun these days with my Raspberry-pi! Since I’ve already built my own tool chain to cross-compile from my Windows plus Cygwin machine and setup my IDE to compile and debug my software using it, I finally started to compile some projects. Unfortunately I had to face a couple of problems: how to make the ./configure script use my tool chain to generate Raspberry-Pi binaries in cygwin?...

I finally succeeded in compiling a working cross-compilation tool chain for my Raspberry Pi. It took me a while, but thanks to some valuable posts on the Raspberry Pi forum by Ian Linsdell and some luck I finally made it. The tool chain contains the Linaro versions of GCC (gcc-linaro-4.6-2012.07) and GDB (gdb-linaro-7.4-2012.06) compiled with the hardfp option. Simply unpack the archive in the /opt/cross/x-tools folder of your Cygwin installation (i....

Let me guess: you just wrote your new, shining CUDA application to unleash all the horsepower of your GPU and you are getting some compilation errors in Visual Studio. Some really weird errors. Something like: 1>CUDA_myfile.cu_generated.c 1>C:\Programmi\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\INCLUDE\vadefs.h(52) : error C2059: syntax error : ‘string’ 1>C:\Programmi\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\INCLUDE\vadefs.h(61) : error C2059: syntax error : ‘string’ 1>c:\cuda\include\vector_types.h(426) : error C2059: syntax error : ‘type’ 1>c:\cuda\include\vector_types.h(427) : error C2059: syntax error : ‘type’...

Beh, se lo siete, allora è una vera fortuna che stiate seguendo questo blog. Girovagando per la rete ho scoperto questo fantastico strumento opensource, WinMerge, che ha tutte le funzioni di windiff ed in più una accattivante veste grafica. La ciliegina sulla torta? Si integra alla perfezione con TortoiseSVN: un MUST. Well, if you are, consider yourself lucky to read this blog. I was tired of windiff, and I started looking for something more interesting, which could also be integrated with my versioning control environment (TortoiseSVN)....

I love experimenting: exploring the unknown (or proving the known), often just for personal knowledge. I guess that’s the reason why every wannabe game programmer tried at least once in his/her life to write a game engine from scratch. That’s not exactly the case of Peter Rakos, an expert, who wrote a 3d engine just using Microsoft Excel (and his brain). Intriguing, isn’t it? I seriously recommend you to give his article a read, trust me....

One thing programmers and software engineers know for sure (or at least should know) is that it doesn’t really matter how much time you spend on documenting, designing or keeping code clean: things may break and often will break. That’s a possibility that must be considered when working on an important project. Things get even worst when more than one person is working on the same stuff. Luckily, there is something we can count on to sleep peacefully: Subversion (SVN Wikipedia Page), a version control system....