keeping the community informed...

Take a survey, win a Treo

This month our newsletter sponsor is the New Workplace Survey, which is being conducted by Basex which researches and analyzes knowledge worker management and productivity issues.

The New Workplace survey focuses on issues such as whether we work with technology or if we are truly prisoners of it, and how we sometimes use our own ingenuity to improve upon the software and make a difference in productivity.

The survey is looking for real life stories about the creative use of technology to enhance productivity and how workers adapt technology in creative ways. If you take the time to complete the survey, you will receive a free executive summary of the findings and one participant will win a new Palm Treo 680.

Please support our sponsors.


Community News

The big DaniWeb community news this month is that it is competition time again. Not only is this a great opportunity to get blogging, but there are some truly fantastic prizes to be won. The total prize pool has a value of $1500, and includes such goodies as a 24” widescreen LCD monitor, the latest multi-megapixel compact digital camera and even an Xbox 360 games console.

Here’s that announcement in full:

Be the best, blog at DaniWeb, win BIG prizes

Following on from the success of our first blogging contest here at DaniWeb, we are proud to announce the start of an all new, even better competition with some truly amazing prizes.

If you’ve got something to say about IT, say it in your DaniWeb blog during the months of December and January and you could be in with a chance of winning some fantastic prizes. The winner will be able to choose* an item from a prize pool totaling in excess of $1500 value. Maybe you fancy a 24” widescreen LCD monitor, or how about the latest multi-megapixel compact digital camera, or even an Xbox 360 games console?

Remember, all you have to do to be in with a chance of winning some great prizes is to start blogging.

The winner will be the member whose blog postings attract the most traffic during the life of the competition. There will actually be two winners, one for the blog attracting the most views and one for the blog with the most trackbacks. Each will be able to pick their booty from the grand prize pool. As a special incentive, there will also be a great bonus prize on offer if the winner exceeds 50,000 views or 10,000 trackbacks in total.

How do you get traffic to your blog? You simply ensure that your postings are timely, original, interesting and well written while at the same time promoting them through exploring syndication options, submitting them to services such as Digg, Slashdot, Reddit and others, and being creative without breaking the rules. This means no spamming, and no creating multiple accounts to increase your view count. We will be watching for people who attempt to cheat, and cheaters will be disqualified immediately. Otherwise, it is up to you how you get people to read your blog, but the more effort you put in, the more views you will get and the better your chance to win the big prize.

DaniWeb blogs are dedicated to IT, in particular IT in the news be that as straightforward news reporting, analysis or opinion. Anything that is discussed in the (non-lounge) forums is pretty much fair game as subject matter for blog postings. As long as your postings are interesting, thought provoking, well written, current and original. DaniWeb will not tolerate cut and paste blogging, and any entries found to violate copyright will be deleted and the blogger disqualified from the competition.

Remember, DaniWeb blogs are a little different to some that you might have seen: if you want an outlet to talk about politics, food, religion or whatever then this is not the place to do it. Nor are the blogs the place to ask for support or post tutorials. Entries that ignore this advice will simply be deleted.

If you want a yardstick by which to measure what a DaniWeb blog posting should be like, please see the Inside Edge blog. If you look at the trackbacks for postings here, you will also get some ideas as to where likely traffic generation can be found.

Remember to write a proper introduction to your blog rather than doing so as a blog posting, or it will quickly get lost. Also, give some thought to what you call your blog, this might impact upon the number of visitors it attracts!


THE RULES

1. The competition will start on December 1st and run until the end of January 31st.
   
2. DaniWeb administrators are not eligible for entry.
   
3. Only on-topic, IT news related postings will be counted.
   
4. If no member reaches a minimum of 10,000 views or 1000 trackbacks in total, DaniWeb reserves the right not to award any prizes.
   
5. Members can be as creative as they like in order to attract traffic to their blogs, but spamming and the creation of multiple accounts will not be tolerated. Anyone found bringing DaniWeb into disrepute will not only be disqualified but banned as well.
   
6. The decision of the site administrators will be final in respect of the winners, and a league table of the final counts will be published on DaniWeb for reference.

*These are examples only, actual prizes may vary depending upon availability.


And Finally...

Member Profile: BamaStangGuy

Welcome to the newest DaniWeb moderator, BamaStangGuy
Brent is 21 years old and lives in Alabama. Running 4 vBulletin powered forums as a full time job, he is the perfect candidate to come in and help moderate the Site Management forums here on DaniWeb.

“My biggest forum is a Ford Mustang community” Brent says “I am just your typical 21 year old that likes to hang out with friends and work on my car.....”

Well, maybe not that typical, as this 21 year old is also committed to forum SEO and monetization. Way to go Brent, you’re a DaniWeb kind of guy!

by happygeek

You know when you are invited to the St John’s Innovation Centre, part of the Cambridge Enterprise Hub in the UK that supports early-stage knowledge-based businesses and research institutes, that you are going to be in for an interesting day. When it is a press day with a focus on ‘Smart Technology’ and the keynote is being given by none other than Dr Hermann Hauser, the man behind Acorn Computers and ARM all those years ago and now, as co-founder of Amadeus Capital Partners, involved with numerous world beating emerging technologies such as plastic electronics, the level of ‘interesting’ is guaranteed to be top notch.

And so it was, with a hugely interesting presentation on the nature and progress of innovation, and the part that Cambridge University and the technology enterprise sector that has built up around it, has played. Full of insightful anecdotes: I didn’t know that apparently Bell Labs invented the first mobile phone but after market research decided there was no market for it managed to completely miss that particular gravy train. Packed with amazing statistics: 60% of all Bluetooth chips originate from Cambridge courtesy of Amadeus funded CSR who invented the first single chip Bluetooth solution and now dominate the mobile market for such items, and 80% of the world’s mobile phones (not forgetting the GameBoy and the iPod) use an ARM processor also invented at Cambridge.

Cambridge University is rated as the third best in the world and has a staggering 72 Nobel Laureates to its name, so perhaps it should come as no surprise that it is such a centre of innovation. And there were certainly some fascinating and innovative technologies being demonstrated. A virtual gut that accurately simulates the physical and biochemical aspects of human digestion so as to provide an alternative to animal testing for scientists. A system that combines multiple audio channels to boost mobile phone reception by 200% without the need for additional, battery sapping, hardware. A security modeling environment that enables accurate simulation of security issues such as a terror attack on an airport, providing a method for building and testing communications between emergency services, air traffic control and security agencies that once honed and working can be unplugged from the virtual world and turned into instant reality. Even a virtual shop assistant in the form of an interactive avatar that ‘lives’ in the glass of a store window, responding when a potential customer touches the glass and providing out of hours information and out of store advertising.

But the product that will, perhaps, be of most interest to DaniWeb users comes from a Cambridge company called Undo, with what it claims to be the first bidirectional debugger for compiled programs.

UndoDB allows you to peer inside a running program and reverse the execution of the software, in other words it is a debugger that can run backwards regardless of the programming language used and without requiring expensive specialized hardware. Well, kind of, because the current version only supports certain Linux/x86 platforms although Undo assured me that it was working on wider support.

With software bugs estimated to cost $60 billion a year in the US alone, debugging is a huge problem. “Computer bugs are still an every-day fact of life” Greg Law, Managing Director of Undo Ltd told me “incredibly annoying for users and difficult for software developers to prevent. Programmers might not like to admit it, but they can spend most of their time debugging – a process which currently eats up around 80% of software development costs.” The statistic should come as no surprise, given that traditionally the debugging process is a protracted cycle of running the code over and over in an attempt to spot the exact point where the program goes pear shaped. Which is where UndoDB comes in, giving a visual demonstration of the program being reversed, and taking the code backwards step by step.

By giving the developer full control over the nature of the time travel, for want of a better description, it reduces the time taken to determine where the bug first occurred. This control equates to an ability to step back your program line-by-line, rewind it to any point in its history and of course debug it forwards as well. This forwards and backwards movement can be done in a totally repeatable fashion, so making it much easier, in theory at least, to home in on the cause of a bug.

Currently supporting, Debian Sarge (2.4 and 2.6), Fedora Core 3, 4 and 5, Gentoo 2006.0, Mandriva 2006.0, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Slackware 10.2, SUSE 10 and Ubuntu 5.10, UndoDB is available now, free of charge (although not open source) for developers who don’t get paid for their work, and for those that do there is a 30 day trial version and a $495 per seat price tag.

Of course, by now some of you are probably thinking that this isn’t actually anything new at all. After all, the concept of bidirectional debugging has been around for a few years and there are other applications out there for the Java programmers amongst you. VisiComp's RetroRue being the most obvious, and the high profile research tool from the brain of Bil Lewis, Omniscient Debugger. It’s even true to say that UndoDB is not the first to be able to step compiled programs backwards if you count something like the GreenHill’s TimeMachine which takes a dedicated hardware approach to the problem and will set you back something in the region of $20,000. But what Undo has accomplished is worthy of recognition, because it has brought an affordable solution to the compiled program debugging problem, and for that we should all be grateful. It uniquely enables bidirectional debugging of arbitrary Linux binary programs, including those written in C or C++, without requiring any recompilation or other modifications to the program being debugged.

"operating activex ajax applications asp blog code debugging developer development dom email exploit feed france gmail google graphics hardware innovation intel internet java laptop licensing linux malware microsoft mobile msdn news nvidia office onecare parliament peripherals pricing processor programming reader research rss search security seo software sony spam sql sun switching system" technology virus vista weather web wiki windows xml xoap xp yahoo