Topic: General News

Jaap Suter released a new Geometric Algebra Primer on his web site. Available in PDF and PS format, this 64-page document offers an introduction to geometric algebra, which is a new way of dealing with geometrical concepts and relations. The article includes examples relevant for computer graphics.

The Code Project has an article providing a skeleton for adding OpenGL code to your Java Applications. The sample project shows how to run an OpenGL animation inside your AWT Canvas Widget. This is possible by the new JNi-based JAWT interface in JDK1.3. Also interesting to OpenGL developers, GLTrace is a programming utility that intercepts and logs OpenGL calls made by a running application. It can be used on ANY OpenGL application- no source code is required. Use it to debug your own software, or learn from others.

Edsger Dijkstra, an influential and early pioneer in the field of computing science, passed away on August 6th at the age of 72, after a long battle with cancer. Among many achievements, Dijkstra is best known for his controversial essay, Go To Statement Considered Harmful, as well Dijkstra's Semaphores. His entire collection of work is available online.

The C/C++ User's Journal's August 2002 issue has an online feature article which introduces a framework for building cross-platform dialog boxes which adapt to the look and feel of their platform.

Developer.com has an introduction to using XML as an application-level protocol. The article discusses how XML can be used in this manner, and why it is such an excellent choice to represent and implement message passing between intended parties.

C++ templates are very handy for engineering generic algorithms for a variety of problems. However, certain situations require code that is type-aware in order to function properly. DevX.com has a quick look at the use of template specializations as a way of overriding the default behavior of templates in order to accomodate these situations.

The C/C++ Users Journal's feature article for July has an online feature article by Bjarne Stroustrup which takes a look at compatibility issues between C and C++. It is the first of three articles discussing these issues. Updated 2002/07/09 @ 00:03 JST: Changed story URL as article has been archived.

As seen in this Slashdot developers story, Microsoft's new F# language brings functional programming to the .NET platform. F# is an implementation of Caml with cross-language extensions.

DevX.com has an interesting comparison of concurrency control between Oracle and Microsoft's SQL Server. The article discusses the differences and implication between the way the two RDBMS engines handle locking on reads when an update transaction is in progress.

Think you know your Free Software licensing rules? The GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation is running an eye-opening quiz on the GPL and LGPL licenses. I did pretty poorly on the results. How will you make out?