NVIDIA has released version 4.1 of its CUDA Toolkit for general purpose GPU computing.



There is a lot in this release, including a compiler based on LLVM, which will make it easier to support other programming languages; 1000 new imaging functions; and a re-designed visual profiler.

There is also an update to Parallel Nsight, for debugging and profiling CUDA applications...

Microsoft is launching SQL Server 2012 on  March 7th 2012. In Microsoft’s world “launches” do not always coincide with the availability of release code, which may come before or after, but they are usually not far apart.

The big news in SQL Server 2012 is in new BI (Business Intelligence) features and the ability to import and export from the open source Hadoop framework. Microsoft is also supporting Hadoop on Windows Server and Windows Azure. Robert Sheldon has an excellent article on TechTarget...

When Adobe announced a shift in its business strategy in November, it was not clear what the implications were for the products that were no longer favoured. Since then bits of information have dripped out, presumably as the company itself works out its priorities. In December developers learned that Flash Catalyst would be discontinued and Flash Builder would have features removed. Now VP Arun Anantharaman has posted about what is happening to LiveCycle, the Enterprise Services side of Adobe.

Quick summary: Anantharaman says that the following “core offerings” will be the subject of continuing investment:

Modules: Reader Extensions, Forms, Output, Digital Signatures, Rights Management, Process Management, PDF Generation Tools: Workbench, Designer Solutions:...

I spoke to Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie yesterday, just before today’s announcement of the opening of an EMEA headquarters in Reading. It has only 4 or 5 staff at the moment, mostly sales and marketing, but will expand into professional services and training.

Appcelerator’s product is a cross-platform (though see below) development platform for both desktop and mobile applications. The mobile aspect makes this a hot market to be in, and the company says it has annual growth of several hundred percent. “We’re not profitable yet, but we’ve got about 1300 customers now,” Haynie told me. “ On the developer numbers side, we’ve got about 235,000 mobile developers and about 35,000 apps that have been built.”



In...

Zend, a company which specialises in PHP frameworks and tools, has released the results of a developer survey from November 2011.

The survey attracted 3,335 respondents drawn, it says, from “enterprise, SMB and independent developers worldwide.” I have a quibble with this, since I believe the survey should state that these were PHP developers. Why? Because I have an email from November which asked me to participate and said:

Zend is taking the pulse of PHP developers. What’s hot and what matters most in your view of PHP?

There is a difference between “developers” and “PHP developers”, and much though I love PHP the survey should make this clear. Nevertheless, If you participated, but mainly use Java or some other language, your input is still included. Later the survey states that “more than 50% of enterprise...

This is one of those posts that will not interest you unless you have a similar problem. That said, it does illustrate one general truth, that in software problems are often not what they first appear to be, and solving them can be like one of those adventure games where you think your quest is for the magic gem, but when you find the magic gem you discover that you also need the enchanted ring, and so on.

Recently I have been troubleshooting a session problem on an ASP.NET application running on a shared host (IIS 7.0).

This particular application has a form with some lengthy text fields. Users complete the form and then hit save. The problem: sometimes they would take too long thinking, and when they hit save they would lose their work and be redirected to a login page. It is the kind of thing most of us have experienced once in a while on a discussion forum.

The solution seems easy though. Just increase the session timeout.  However, this had already been done, but the sessions still seemed...

I watched Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer give the last in a long series of Microsoft keynotes at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.



There were three themes: Windows Phone, Windows 8, and Xbox with Kinect. It was a disappointing keynote though, mainly because of the lack of new news. Most of the Windows Phone presentation could have been from last year, except that we now have Nokia involvement which has resulted in stronger devices and marketing. What we have is in effect a re-launch necessitated by the failure of...

Steven Sinofsky has posted on the Building Windows 8 blog, making it clear that this feature is coming to the Windows 8 client as well as to Windows Server 8.

I took a hands-on look at Storage Spaces back in October.



The feature lets you add and remove physical drives from a pool of storage, create virtual disks in that pool with RAID-like resiliency if you have more than one physical drive available. There is also “thin provisioning”, which lets you create a virtual disk bigger than the available space. It sounds daft at first, but makes sense if you think of it as a resource to which you add media as needed rather than paying for it all up-front. It

The...

The new Asus Transformer Prime TF201 Android tablet is winning praise for its performance and flexibility. It is driven by NVIDIA’s quad-core Tegra 3 processor and can be equipped with a keyboard and dock that extends battery life and makes the device more like a laptop.

All good; but techie users are upset that the bootloader is encrypted, which means the kernel cannot be modified other than through official Asus updates.

A petition on the subject has achieved over 2000 signatures. Detailed discussion of the implications are here.



Why...

Research company Evans Data sent me a link this morning to its new Tool Grader service. This is a simple web application for reviewing and rating software tools. The same tool may rated separately rated for different platforms. For example, there is one entry for Eclipse under UNIX/Linux, and another separate one under Tools for Mobile.

I took a quick look and rate the site mostly useless. There are not many reviews, and most of the reviews are of little value, for example “This Is The Best Programming Tool i Have Ever Used,” from somebody who says that Eclipse “Must be used as a competitor for Java.”



The...