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Pathfinder was a decade-long program of robotic exploration of the planet Mars. Glenn Reeves, the mission's "Flight Software Cognizant Engineer," chats with Jack Woehr about Pathfinder and what's involved in writing software for extraterrestrial exploration.
When dealing with real-time systems, IPC overhead becomes important. Fred examines two of the best IPC mechanisms available under Linux -- FIFO and shared memory.
Sven untangles the mysterious Windows NT NtQuerySystemInformation function.
Packaging code into shared libraries can enhance code reuse and reduce in-memory footprints. Greg takes a look at the Palm shared library model and presents a shared library you can use.
The PowerTV operating system is designed for set-top boxes and hybrid fiber/cable networks. Morgan provides an overview of the OS, then presents a weather/traffic camera viewer application.
Regan presents BeRays, an object-oriented ray-tracer application that makes it easy to plug in new rendering ideas.
LegOS, the tiny, yet powerful operating system Markus built as an alternative to the RCX firmware, supports features such as preemptive multitasking, dynamic memory management, POSIX semaphores, infrared (IR) communication, and more.
Jbed, a small, fast Java Virtual Machine for embedded real-time systems, includes a complete real-time operating system.
Zhimin and Li examine the application of machine-learning technology to control software agents, and present MLEngine -- a general-purpose AI engine with real-time learning capability.
The XML|IT toolkit from CareFlow lets you automatically tag results returned from calls to CORBA services, then format them using XML.
According to Arthur C. Clarke, any sufficiently advanced technology looks like magic. Michael looks at some of the magical moments that are shaping the world.
Al has a thing or two to say about book publishers and programming books, then he turns his attention to this month's project -- TYFC, a framework to "Teach Yourself Framework Classes."
Does Java support Design by Contract? Not directly, but as Krishnan shows here, support is still possible.
Unsharp masking is a photographic technique that increases the sharpness of photographic images. Tim presents an algorithm that implements this concept.
One man's Calabaza is another man's pocket watch, as Ecco and Liane discover this month.
Greg examines Mr. Bunny's Big Cup o' Java, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, Ready-to-Run Java 3D, The Java 3D API Specification, Advanced CORBA Programming with C++, and Inside the JavaOS Operating System.