Video: The state of Floating-Point, circa 1995

Recently, I digitized several VHS tapes from the  “Bay Area Computer History Perspectives” series of lectures. These lectures were sponsored by Sun Microsystems Inc (alas, now only a ghost image of its former self since the Oracle merger) in the mid-90’s. They feature big names involved in the history of these topics (ie: original designers, […]

Release of the extract_lines Python module

Yesterday I wrote-up a page about extract_lines, a Python module I developed recently to automate some text extraction tasks. Many engineers have to analyze tabular or line-oriented human-readable reports and source code. For instance, suppose we want to extract constant coefficients from a C source file (snippet taken from Bessel functions of the first kind […]

DL4195A v1.2 released

A new version (1.2) of the DL4195A program is now available. The following changes were made: Fixed a bug where the program would crash if no serial ports at all were installed on the machine Added online help Added a textual description of the serial ports using the Windows registry Added a new icon Fixed […]

New HP4195A page

I recently spent the time to write an information page about the HP4195A. Since I had written a tool to download data from those devices using a Prologix GPIB/USB adapter, I thought I would share the resources I had for the machine as well. Enjoy the new contents 🙂

Resources For Learning SWT/JFace

The Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) from the Eclipse project is a great native GUI toolkit for Java that is gaining in popularity constantly because of the Eclipse Platform‘s success. The learning curve for this toolkit can be easier if you are careful about the sources of information you use to get started. That’s because a […]

Java2D under SWT: coercing Graphics2D functionality into SWT

Context (or skip to solution 🙂 ) I am currently working on a medium-scale personal project in Electronics Design Automation. I am usually very keen on building scripts and programs to make board-level design tasks faster for me and others. This time around, I am designing a Package Generator program to generate footprints for different […]

Sources of toolbar icons for your GUI applications

If you’re like me, you have had to deal with finding or drawing tons of toolbar icons over your programming career for all those GUI applications that require them. Sometimes you get lucky and you can cut’n’paste from a screen grab or get them from a previous project. What happens, however, when you want to […]

PDFCreator 0.9.6 finally supports Vista (get it!)

I recently realized that PDFCreator now fully supports Windows Vista. PDFCreator is probably the best free PDF-making software for Win32 systems. It not only outputs PDF, but also PNG, TIFF, JPEG, PS and a host of other formats. It acts as a Printer driver under Windows (98, Me, XP and Vista) so it is very […]

Fixing DNS proxy issues in Vista ICS with Acrylic DNS proxy

The Problem: I recently installed Ubuntu Linux on my old PowerMac G4 “QuickSilver” tower. During the installation, I needed to use my internet connection over WiFi to download the installation packages. I tried using Linux’s WiFi support with my Mac’s AirPort card, but to no avail. It could see the access points, but not actually […]