DDJ, May 1998 - Numerics and the Year 2000


FEATURES

DATE COMPRESSION AND YEAR 2000 CHALLENGES

by Robert L. Moore and D. Gregory Foley

Ultimately, fixing Y2K problems is about fixing storage overflow, and there are a variety of solutions that address the problem. Bob and Greg examine some of these solutions, focusing on date compression.

STRATEGIES FORSOLVING THEY2K PROBLEM

by William Gothard and Les Rodner

Even though Y2K solutions are fairly straightforward, the Year 2000 crisis still is a bet-your-business problem. Our authors describe the analysis, conversion, and testing process.

A YEAR 2000 TOOL SUITE

by Dev Bhattacharyya

Dev presents a Year 2000 toolset written in Java, consisting of a scanning tool that examines source code for date-related areas, and a data ager tool that lets you manipulate existing production data.

HDF: THE HIERARCHICAL DATA FORMAT

by Brand Fortner

The Hierarchical Data Format, developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, is a portable, self-describing data format for moving and sharing scientific data in networked, heterogeneous computing environments.

ALGORITHMS FOR HIGH-PRECISION FINITE DIFFERENCES

by Michael Herstine

Michael presents algorithms that help you improve numerical methods in situations where obtaining greater accuracy from the function evaluations is difficult or impossible.

THE PENTIUM F00F BUG

by Robert R. Collins

When x86 processors encounter an invalid instruction, the processor is supposed to generate an invalid opcode exception. If this mechanism fails, however, the program can bring the system down -- and that's what happens with the F00F bug.

EXTENDING WINDOWS CE 2.0 MFC DATABASE CLASSES

by John C. Schettino, Jr.

John presents a set of Windows CE database classes and subclasses of the 2.0 MFC classes that provide an object-oriented wrapper to the basic database search API.

CUSTOMIZING DDX/DDV

by Jean-Denis Bertron

Jean-Denis implements a system for customizing data exchange routines to add macro processing to Windows.

EMBEDDED SYSTEMS

FAST MEMORY ALLOCATION

by H. Thomas Richter

In embedded-controller projects with execution time constraints, it's okay to sacrifice memory for speed. The power-of-two Fast Memory Allocator (FMA) Thomas presents here is used in just such a project.

INTERNET PROGRAMMING

ACTIVE DATA OBJECTS & ASP

by Mark Betz

Active Server Pages are useful for generating output and managing application state on behalf of a client. When combined with Active Data Objects, your scripts can manipulate ODBC data sources to do nearly anything that is possible in native SQL.

PROGRAMMER'S TOOLCHEST

THE HOT VIEWS GRAPHICS LIBRARY

by David P. Heddle

The Hot Views (Hv) graphical user-interface library was designed for use in scientific modeling and simulation applications.

PROFILE-GUIDED OPTIMIZATIONS

by Gary Carleton, Knud Kirkegaard, and David Sehr

Profile-guided optimizations feed information about how a program executes back to the compiler. This allows the compiler to focus its efforts more effectively on the regions of programs that matter for execution time.

COLUMNS

PROGRAMMING PARADIGMS

by Michael Swaine

Y2K guru Bob Bemer takes time out to chat with Michael about a big problem...the early days of Cobol and the latter days of the Y2K problem.

C PROGRAMMING

by Al Stevens

Al implements a C++ version of the Midifile C function libraries that parse MIDI files. He then takes a look at Bjarne Stroustrup's The C++ Programming Language, Third Edition.

JAVA Q&A

by L. Richard Moore

Streaming audio refers to audio that can be downloaded at the same speed it is played. Rick presents idtAudio, a streaming audio applet written in Java.

ALGORITHM ALLEY

by John Boyer

John introduces algorithms for and implementations of linked-list sorting and searching that are more efficient than those available in the Java Developer's Kit 1.2 Beta 2.

UNDOCUMENTED CORNER

by Robert R. Collins

In previous columns, Robert examined why Intel's Virtual Mode Extensions (VME) are needed and how they work. This month, he wraps up his analysis of VME by pointing out some of its caveats.

DR. ECCO'S OMNIHEURIST CORNER

by Dennis E. Shasha

Dr. Ecco and crew tackle the problem of "nimmerics," which even stymied the Feds.

PROGRAMMER'S BOOKSHELF

by Peter N. Roth

Peter takes a look at Fuzzy Engineering, by Bart Kosko, Applications of Fuzzy Logic, edited by Mohammad Jamshidi, Andri Titli, Lotfi Zadeh, and Serge Boverie, and The Design and Development of Fuzzy Logic, by Byron Miller.

FORUM

EDITORIAL

by Jonathan Erickson

LETTERS

by you

NEWS & VIEWS

by the DDJ staff

OF INTEREST

by Eugene Eric Kim

SWAINE'S FLAMES

by Michael Swaine


Copyright © 1998, Dr. Dobb's Journal