It's live!  The latest update of the Sun Studio compilers and tools is now available for free download.

Release notes, readmes, and documentation.

Available now on the OpenSolaris repository

Over at Nerd Central, slashdot.org, there's a lively discussion going on about programming languages. It all started when a soon-to-be Computer Science graduate in the U.K. asked which programming languages should he learn in depth?

Follow along »the discussion thread. Some of it is very revealing, including the one reply "Give up on CS and go to nursing school."

Sun Studio Express 3/09 compilers and tools was released today!

You can download it off the Sun Studio portal.

Available on Solaris, OpenSolaris, and the latest Linux distributions (Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SuSE Linux Enterprise, CentOS, Ubuntu), new feature highlights since the Sun Studio 12 release include:

• C/C++/Fortran compiler optimizations for the latest x86 architectures from Intel and AMD including SSSE3, SSSE4a, SSe4.1, SSE4.2 compiler intrinsics support
• C/C++/Fortran compiler optimizations for the latest UltraSPARC and SPARC64-based architectures
• DLight - New tool to utilize and visualize the power of Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace) technology (see the DLight Tutorial)
• dbxTool - New standalone GUI debugger
• MPI performance analysis in the Performance Analyzer
• Full OpenMP 3.0 compilers and tools support
• NetBeans IDE 6.5 including new remote development feature

This release is a preview of the next major release of Sun Studio 12, and you can participate in the Sun Studio 12 Update 1 Early Access program.

By participating in the Early Access Program, you will have the opportunity to evaluate new capabilities of Sun Studio software, provide your feedback to the product team and influence future product releases.

Participating in the Early Access Program

1. Download Sun Studio Express 3/09. Sun Studio Express 3/09 is the official build used for the Sun Studio 12 Update 1 Early Access Program.
2. For installation instructions and new feature information, see the March 2009 Express readme. Then check out the Express wiki pages to learn more.
3. Visit the Early Access Forum to discuss issues and receive advice from the Sun Studio community, including Sun Studio engineers
4. To submit a bug or request a feature (RFE), please visit: http://bugreport.sun.com/bugreport/. Please populate the field titled "Release" with the value "Sun Studio Express."
5. Complete and submit the Sun Studio 12 Update 1 Evaluation Survey, which will be available March 25. This is the primary way to provide your feedback to the product team.

I learned yesterday that one of my mentors has passed.

Jack Schwartz was a professor of mathematics at NYU’s Courant Institute when I was there in the mid 1960’s. He founded the Computer Science department at NYU.

Jack also devised one of the first time-sharing systems, SHARER, to which he invited some brilliant NYC high school students to develop. Many of those students went on to important careers in the field.

But what I remember most about Jack was how warm and generous he was, even tho his reputation as a mathematician, as John Markoff  puts it in his obituary in today’s New York Times, was fearsome.

The three years I spent working in the computer center at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences (CIMS), from 1965-1968, were the most important three years in my life (so far). It started my career in computer programming for science and engineering. We were all quite young, and Jack, and the director of the CIMS Computer Center, Max Goldstein, were our “father figures”.  And as such, we mark his passing.

 My other life is involved with this:

WHAT: 14th Other Minds Music Festival

WHO: Nine international composers—Michael Harrison (USA), Dobromiła Jaskot (Poland), Ben Johnston (USA), Catherine Lamb (USA), Chico Mello (Brazil), John Schneider (USA), Linda Catlin Smith (Canada), Bent Sørensen (Denmark), and Chinary Ung (Cambodia)

WHEN: Thursday-Friday-Saturday, March 5-6-7, 2009  7pm Panel Discussions, 8pm Concerts

WHERE: Kanbar Hall, Jewish Community Center of San Francisco (JCCSF)  3200 California Street (at Presidio Ave.), San Francisco

TICKETS: Single concert tickets $25–$35 ($25 student, $31 JCCSF members, $35 general); Festival passes $60–$150 ($60 student, $74 JCCSF members, $79 general, $150 premium seating); Students 17 and under free on concert days. Tickets available online from www.otherminds.org or through the JCCSF Box Office, (415) 292-1233 (M–F 12–7pm, Sat. 12–5pm), www.jccsf.org/arts (JCCSF subscription series tickets also available)

INFORMATION: (415) 934-8134 • www.otherminds.org • otherminds-AT-otherminds.org

MORE:

The 14th Other Minds Music Festival (OM 14) brings together nine of the most exciting and innovative composers from around the world for concerts and artist talks. The festival, produced by Other Minds Executive and Artistic Director Charles Amirkhanian and Associate Director Adam Fong, continues its annual tradition of bringing together in conversation and concert the most creative voices from across the musical spectrum. The concert presentations feature four world premiere performances including The Tavern by American legend Ben Johnston (b. 1926), the US premiere of a work by Estonian Arvo Pärt for eight cellos, a special presentation in memory of Mauricio Kagel (1931–2008), Harry Partch’s Two Studies on Ancient Greek Scales and Barstow, “de-composed” songs based on Brazilian classics, and three more world premieres including a new work commissioned by Other Minds, and Tone Clouds by La Monte Young protégé Michael Harrison, composed for just intonation piano and San Francisco’s Del Sol String Quartet. 

The 14th Other Minds Music Festival is presented by Other Minds in association with the Djerassi Resident Artists Program (DRAP), the Eugene and Elinor Friend Center for the Arts of the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco (JCCSF) and the Polish Cultural Institute for the Arts. The Festival begins on February 28, 2009, with four days of private retreat for guest composers at DRAP in Woodside, California, and continues with concerts on Thursday, March 5; Friday, March 6; and Saturday, March 7, 2009, at the JCCSF.

And you can hear some of the composers and performers of OM 14 on my radio program. Details at otherminds.org/mfom

Just couldn't cut it. So I gave in and upgraded Photoshop for my MacOSX 10.4.11 system. Gimp just didn't satisfy, and I never liked the results. So we're back with Photoshop.

However, I have had some crashes. And even Firefox now sometimes crashes. 

So do I have to upgrade to 10.5?

Ugh.

As an experiment, I've started another blog

Compile My Code - blogs.sun.com/run

Meditations on compiling C, C++, and Fortran

Well, using Gimp as a replacement for Photoshop is not as easy as it would seem. And, I'm growing increasingly more frustrated. It doesn't seem to do as nice a job as similar operations in Photoshop, and it's a real pain to use. It might be lack of familiarity on my part, but I think I'm going to have to give up on the plan and go back to Photoshop. Gimp is proving to be too aggrevating.

Also, the version of Gimp on the OpenSolaris repository is a few versions behind. The version for MacOSX 10.4+ is up to date. That's annoying, but I'm not willing to waste time compiling the thing just to get the latest version on my OS laptop. Hrrrmph.

But right now I can't justify the expense of yet another Photoshop upgrade (YAPU) to the family CFO, so I'll probably drop back to 10.3.9 until I can sell enough used books, or one of my cameras, to pay for it.

Tough times.

Even tougher, come to think of it .. it's vacation over and back to work on Monday.

One of the real conundrums this time is worrying over how to upgrade my working system. I’m a “trailing edge” person .. I’d rather not upgrade my software unless it’s absolutely necessary. So my primary, not-for-work-but-just-for-me system is a 1 GHz PowerPC Mac G4 running OSX 10.3.9. (The system I use for working-from-home is a 2 GHz AMD 64 laptop running OpenSolaris).

I should really upgrade to 10.4.11 (I believe 10.5 doesn’t run PowerPC’s) because a lot of the upgrades for software that I do use is no longer being made available for 10.3.9.

So I’ve been experimenting with 10.4.11 on a second internal disk drive. I can now boot either 10.3.9 or 10.4.11. The only trouble is with Photoshop .. my version 8 won’t run on 10.4 without an expensive upgrade. I refuse to pay it.

I installed Sun Studio Express 2008.11 on Ubuntu 8.10 running on my OpenSolaris 2008.11 platform using VirtualBox to host Ubuntu as a client OS.

Now, there's no real reason for doing this... Sun Studio Express runs just fine on OpenSolaris natively. But I just wanted to see what it would look like on Ubuntu.

The only wrinkle in running Sun Studio Express on Ubuntu was having to install the Java JDK, which apparently is not part of the default Ubuntu 8.10. But I was able to find it on the Ubuntu repository and install it using their package manager. Very easy.

I tried this only because someone on one of the Ubuntu forums asked if Sun Studio Express compilers and tools ran on Ubuntu 8.10.

Clearly, the answer is YES. And you might find some more information

here:

http://wikis.sun.com/display/SunStudio/Installing+Sun+Studio+on+Different+Linux+Distros

and here:

http://wikis.sun.com/display/SunStudio/Sun+Studio+Linux+Platform+FAQ

Lots of fun here.

I've been using »OpenSolaris 2008.11 for almost a month now as my primary working environment on my Acer Ferrari 4000 AMD64 laptop. It has replaced SXDE (Solaris Express Developer Edition). And I'm really excited about it. It blows all previous versions of OpenSolaris away, at least in this laptop environment.

I love it!

What I especially appreciate is that finally they got the wireless networking working (almost) seamlessly. (Well, with the Ferrari I have to use an Atheros chip set AirLInk 100 PCI card  because the built-in one isn't supported). But now the daemon automatically searches for available wireless networks and lets me decide which one to join. And if I should decide to plug in an ethernet cable, it automatically senses that and switches to the ethernet connection. (Just like my Mac!)

Besides, I've got all the apps I need to work. And the update manager notifies me whenever updated packages are available to download from the repository. Installation was really easy and it automatically preserved my Windows boot volume.

Of course there are always a couple of annoying things. Like sometimes when I switch between wireless and ethernet, or between wireless networkds, I don't always get a working DHCP host IP address assigned. Sometimes it takes a couple of attempts. (Disconnect, reconnect, disconnect again, reconnect again ... Ah! There it is .. were' connected.)  That doesn't happen on my Mac laptop. So I filed a few bugs and we'll see what happens.

The most intgriguing new feature is the "Time Slider" that automatically takes a snapshot of any changed files onto a ZFS filesystem that  you can recover later. It just works, silently, in the background.

And there's a mess of apps on the repository to play with. Especially, of course, Sun Studio Express 2008.11 and OpenOffice 3.0. Firefox 3.0 and Thunderbird are already installed. And it all looks great!

But it's all here and working!

I can't believe I fell into that trap again!

It's been over 12 years since I gave up being a full-time programmer (Fortran, C, assembly) to become a full-time tech writer (uh, sorry, Information Engineer). But I still play with C, Fortran, and some Java and PHP occasionally. 

So last night I was testing out the new release of Sun Studio Express by creating a simple little C code that does numerical integration to compute pi.  It's a textbook piece of code I've used before. So I copy/pasted the code into the editor window and saved it as sum.c, and built the object file sum.o and executable sum.

But when I attempted to run the program in a terminal shell, nothing happened. The program just sat there. No output, no exit, no prompt.

I checked the CPU monitor, nothing was running.

I checked and double checked the C code, the compile arguments, everything seemed ok. I even started removing statements. Still, nothing happened.

Then I ran it in the new GUI debugger, dbxtool. It ran perfectly, and exited as expected. What's going on?!?

I checked and double checked everything. Was I going mad? Have I been away from programming for too long? Am I getting old?!  Is this programmer's Alzheimer's?

Nah, suddenly, out of the blue, it came to me.

rchrd% which sum
/usr/bin/sum

Of course!  There's a command-line app called sum. It computes checksums! And, for security reasons (so they tell me), my $PATH variable is set with dot (.) at the end of the list, not at the front. (Actually, I should have run the local executable with   ./sum --  generally a good rule to follow, but forgot, again!)

Solution: change the executable file to pi. Now it worked perfectly.

I had to laugh. How many times in my 30+ years with Unix have I been bitten by this one? Too many to admit to.

I guess one of the pitfalls of being an occasional programmer is that you tend to forget where the brambles are, and keep walking into that thicket over and over again.

There's now a complete compendium of resources, including tutorials, manuals, blogs, articles, etc, for developing software on Solaris and OpenSolaris. It's about as complete as you can get, thanks to Alta Elstad.

It's on the »Solaris Developer wiki pages: http://wikis.sun.com/display/SolarisDeveloper/SWDevInfoRes

Tutorial S08: A Hands-on Introduction to OpenMP (Full day)

Sunday, November 16, 2008 »SuperComputing ’08, Austin, Texas

Instructors: Larry Meadows, Intel Corporation, Tim Mattson, Intel Corporation

If you are planning on attending the 20^th Anniversary of the SC Conference, to be held this year in Austin from November 15 through 21, and if you are interested in gaining a working knowledge of the OpenMP parallel programming model, then please consider registering for this tutorial, to be held on Sunday, November 16. This is a full day hands-on tutorial. We will alternate lectures with hands-on exercises designed to teach the basics and some advanced topics in OpenMP, including the new OpenMP 3.0 features

UPDATE: The slides and code examples from this tutorial are now available on the OpenMP.org website.