It’s a very simple and modest site with no frills to speak of, but GasTomorrow.com will predict the prices of gas in your neighborhood for tomorrow – so you can make a decision wether to fill up today or hold off until tomorrow. We’re estimating the prices based on a model that takes into consideration the current price of gas in your neighborhood and the day-to-day change in the price of light, sweet crude oil on the market to try and help you save money.

Depending on where you are and what’s going on in the economic and political scenes, the price-per-gallon of gas might change anywhere from two to twenty cents overnight. We did our best to make our predictions as accurate as possible, but of course, anything can happen and we make absolutely no guarantees as to the accuracy of the predictions.

Give it a try and let us know how accurate it is in your neighborhood. Follow us on twitter @neosmart and Like us on Facebook for more cool stuff!

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As many of you are aware, NeoSmart Technologies is one of the companies licensing Windows PE from Microsoft Corp. Back in August of last year, we revealed that we’d struck a deal with Microsoft wherein we’d be licensing Windows PE for use in our system recovery CDs, making them legally available for download for our users. Unfortunately, that agreement will not be in place for much longer, and the recovery and repair CDs in their current form will soon no longer be available for purchase.

Fortunately, we’ve taken advantage of the advance notice provided by Microsoft to research and develop an alternative for the steady stream of visitors who come to our site in search of a bootable CD to repair their non-booting Windows, having access to neither installation media nor backups.

While working on the next generation of our repair CDs, we investigated the most common points of operating system failure and designed our software to detect, target, and repair these problems. Our goal was simple: make the next version of our system repair CDs in every way better: find more problems, fix more problems, and do so with speed, accuracy, and precision.

The next version of our system repair CDs is not just a replacement for the current WinPE-based repair CDs, but rather a whole new software written from the ground up with the express intent of fixing whatever it may be that stops your PC from booting. Windows Recovery Essentials (WinRE for short) will be a one-stop shop PC repair, fixing common and uncommon problems alike, including those that the Windows installation DVD can’t or won’t fix.

WinRE is currently in private beta and will be available soon. In the meantime, here’s a short peek of WinRE Beta in action:

Make sure to view in high-definition and in full-screen!

If you’re interested in taking it for a test drive, be one of the first to leave a comment saying why you’d like a copy, and if you make it good (don’t forget to follow us on twitter @NeoSmart), we can send one your way.

UPDATE

The current status of WinRE is soft-released. They are available for early adoption, testing, and download from http://systemdiscs.com/ and have been renamed to Easy Recovery Essentials (EasyRE for short). More details forthcoming. (May 19th, 2012)

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It seems Microsoft is focusing on providing backgrounds that span the resolution of multiple-monitor setups, so there are only four new “normal widescreen” wallpapers, though the other two can still be used in crop mode easily enough. My favorite is probably the new “origami” beta fish background.

(Note: I will not be reviewing this release of Windows 8; suffice it to say that it is ridiculously hard to use, very much fragmented in terms of UX/UI, and generally focusing on all the wrong things. But nice wallpapers FTW.)

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EasyBCD has been tested extensively with the Windows 8 beta from last year, and should work well. Depending on your Windows 8 configuration, if you wish to install EasyBCD on Windows 8 you may need to enable the .NET 2.0 Framework first. We are, of course, accepting bug reports regarding EasyBCD and Windows 8 in our support forums. Feel free to ask any general Windows 8 questions or observations you might also have. See you there!

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Project Gutenberg (PG from here on out) not only indexes the text of these titles, but also original illustrations, metadata (author(s), publisher(s), date(s), illustration(s), etc., and most importantly, bookmarks/tables of contents). The process of “creating” a book comprises many steps and starts off with scanning the original books, using OCR to convert the scanned images to text, manually reviewing the scanned contents for OCR conversion errors, fixing formatting (footnotes, endnotes, spacing, etc.), marking bookmarks and jump locations, creating tables of contents, and finally, to use a software terminology, “building” the files into many different formats to cover the very much fragmented spectrum of eBook file types.

The reason for this primer on how PG works is to give a sense of how complex the entire endeavor is and all the steps and components involved in the process. There probably are more steps were not more immediately apparent and most of the steps listed above can probably be broken up into several more steps each. The point is, it’s an incredibly complicated and error prone process. And even when it’s done without errors or mistakes, there’s always room for improvement. And this is where the need for version control comes in.

At the start of any Project Gutenberg title, you’ll find something similar to this (between the PG listing info, some disclaimers, and volunteer acknowledgements), as taken from one of my favorite books of all time, The Five Children and It, written by E. Nesbit, published in 1902, and now in the public domain, at least in the USA and the EU (date of death + 70 years).

*Project Gutenberg Etext of Five Children and It, by E. Nesbit*
*****This file should be named fivit10.txt or fivit10.zip******

Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, fivit11.txt.
VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, fivit10a.txt.

Project Gutenberg books are textbook-perfect examples of non-sourcecode projects that would benefit immensely from version control in general, and distributed version control (DVCS), such as GIT, in particular.

As you can see from the PG excerpt above, each book can have “editions” and “versions.” While I think the definitions of “edition” and “version” have been confused (well, to be honest, plain wrong), the important thing is that there are separate publications of each eBook (editions, or what PG is calling “versions”) each with their own sequence of edits and fixes (versions, or what PG is calling “editions”). Books can have typos, formatting errors, OCR mistakes, incorrect metadata, etc. which need fixing or can have features improved or added, such as introducing a linked table of contents, adding annotations, and so on and so forth, all of which warrant the introduction of a new version of a particular edition/publication.

At the same time, books can be available in multiple editions (say, different languages, illustrated vs non-illustrated, different publishing houses, reprints, improved texts, etc.) which are all equally correct and usable (i.e. one edition does not supercede the other).

These attributes of PG titles scream the need for a versioning system. I don’t know whether PG uses a versioning system internally/privately, but no such repository is publicly available (to the best of my knowledge). It’s downright foolish not to take advantage of the wonders a good VS can work with this sort of content: versions are revisions, editions are branches, commit logs preserve integrity and posterity, and an index of all changes is forever kept. Nothing is ever lost or overwritten, and the changes over time can be analyzed, indexed, and reviewed.

Now for the Distributed VCS part: PG accepts both new titles and revisions to existing titles from everyone. With 38,000 titles, that’s nothing to laugh about. Perhaps you spotted a typo in your copy of The Five Children and It introduced during the OCR process, or maybe you’re adding a translation no one has entered before, or you’ve found a missing footnote – with a DVCS solution like Git or Mercurial, nothing could be easier than forking the original, making your changes, then opening a ticket to propose that PG merge your changes back into their “official” distribution!

Or perhaps it’s time to make things even more interesting: these are all public domain titles. That doesn’t just mean that you’re free to read, copy, and distribute them all you like – you can even change what they say! No one can actually stop you from going around and changing your favorite classics. Maybe you want to rename a character, or change the way a particular story ends? It may be a sacrilege, but it’s your right, and with a DVCS, it becomes downright easy to make your changes while keeping them linked to the original, so you can pull any other corrections or fixes made to your “source” branch!

Or perhaps a less sacrilegious/offensive course of action would be to change a particular grammatical oddity. For instance, Edith Nesbit is famous for using “it” as a gender-neutral pronoun for situations where the person(s) being referred to can be male or female (i.e. not an object):

Everyone got its legs kicked or its feet trodden on in the scramble to get out of the carriage.

You can easily enough go through her book (though I’d shoot you if I ever met you afterwards!) and change that to something more conventional (the removal of “on” from “trodden on” is an OCD reaction to the poor parallelism in the original text and not associated with gender-neutral pronouns):

Everyone got his or her legs kicked or its feet trodden on in the scramble to get out of the carriage.

In short, Project Gutenberg cries out for a DVCS interface. Not only does it make linking editions and versions a lot easier and more manageable (imagine if that were 38 million titles instead of 38 thousand? Each being actively maintained and fixed?), it also preserves changes and makes it easy to find who’s responsible for what. It makes it easy for anyone to contribute fixes and changes back (á la Wikipedia), and introduces some very interesting possibilites into the mix (a GitHub-like fan-fiction site!). And, as a freebie, it makes something like integrating nightly build systems to generate the various output formats a breeze!

We’ll be contacting Project Gutenberg with a link to this article and will even offer our services in helping set something like this up, to figuratively put one’s money where one’s mouth is. In the meantime, just think about how DVCS could revolutionize the world!

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We’ve been hard at work for the past couple of months developing a new and ridiculously easy to use translation toolkit (that we’ve decided to open source) which will power the upcoming EasyBCD 2.2 release, giving it the superior intellect required to speak dozens of languages fluently… with your help.

While we have some volunteers already working on translating EasyBCD into a few languages, we need your help to get the word out there and get quality translations for as many languages as possible. The process itself couldn’t be easier, and the end result is both satisfactory and rewarding! (What could be more satisfactory than helping millions, or more rewarding than having your name in EasyBCD’s “About” box and on our website?)

How to Help
Download a copy of the NeoSmart Localization Toolkit (currently in beta) from this thread in our forums. While you’re there, drop us a line letting us know you’re interested in translating language insert language name here so no one else wastes their time when you’re already on it. Then just run the exe, load up the translation files, and get cracking. More info and picture-by-picture instructions are in the previously mentioned thread. We’ll have another post here soon to officially introduce the NLT and our reasons for creating a new localization framework soon.

Please note that you’ll need to either download a copy of EasyBCD 2.2 beta or grab the latest version of the language files from the GitHub page to get translating.

We’re especially looking for help translating EasyBCD into the following languages (in alphabetical order):

• Arabic
• Chinese (Simplified)
• French
• German
• Hindi
• Japanese
• Korean
• Russian
• Spanish

And before we bid you goodbye, salaam, adiós, au revoir, bis dann, or sayonara, we leave you with this screenshot:

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Unlike some of the affected open source software that is listed on CNet, EasyBCD does not use a copyleft license that lets companies and individuals do whatever they want with EasyBCD and repackage it in whichever manner they choose. In fact, in the past whenever we were asked why one of the most popular freeware products available online was not open source, we have repeatedly insisted that the ability to maintain control over the distribution and packing of EasyBCD to ensure an ongoing comfortable and friendly user experience has been our number one reason.

CNet is of course not the only download site using these so-called “downloaders” to bundle unwanted software that unsuspecting users would normally not install. They are, however, one of the largest and prior to this, also one of the more respected download entities. As of today, we shall be contacting any and all companies and sites that use custom “installers” to download/install EasyBCD as this is in direct violation of the EasyBCD license.

While this could not come at a less opportune time, with EasyBCD currently being the 11th most popular download in the System Utilities category on Download.com, we feel that maintaining a fluid and smooth end user experience, uncluttered by various intrusive softwares, is a tradeoff well worth making in order to never be associated with an unsavory experience in the minds of our users.

NeoSmart Technologies would be thrilled to maintain our listings for EasyBCD and other NeoSmart products on Download.com, and we have historically directed many users there to get their downloads. As such, our offer is simply as follows:

• If CNET and other download companies wish to continue, as they did at one point, hosting EasyBCD on their own servers, then it must be in unaltered, unmodified, and non-bundled form.
• If CNET and other download sites do not wish to host the setup package themselves, then they should hotlink the latest version of EasyBCD directly from our servers. The direct download links provided in our PAD files always permit the hotlinking of the latest version of our software, providing direct access to the downloads in question.
• If CNET and other download companies are not willing to refrain from bundling EasyBCD with any other package, installer, downloader, or other non-authorized bundleware nor willing to link to EasyBCD off of our official download servers, then we must unfortunately and with much regret demand the the immediate delisting of all NeoSmart products being provided in anything other than their virgin installer package as it was originally created.

The latest versions of the EasyBCD installer, as well as those of our other popular software and products, are all digitally signed by NeoSmart Technologies. In short, any download for a NeoSmart product must make available the untampered, digitally signed installer as it was originally released by ourselves. Authentic NeoSmart setup packages can be recognized by means of the following digital signature when viewing the file properties:

We are sorry to have to be making these demands, but are left with no other choice as we have always and forever prided ourselves in providing top-notch quality products and a wonderful user experience. We constantly turn down very lucrative and alluring offers to bundle EasyBCD with other “unwanted products” in exchange for rather princely sums of money. Fortunately, our custom, non-GPL/non-opensource license for these softwares allows us to stipulate and demand that download partners conform to our distribution policies. We look forward to updating this post soon with the good news that CNet and others (currently Softonic) have complied with our terms of distribution. A copy of this request has been filed with Upload.com support under case number 111205-000208.

In the meantime, anyone looking to obtain EasyBCD and other freeware or shareware from a download catalog should look at Softpedia (our EasyBCD listing there) and FileHippo (not currently hosting EasyBCD) as good alternatives. In fact, both have text on their site indicating that they pride themselves in providing clean and non-intrusive downloads to original and unmodified packages. We also advise any other freeware authors and developers hosting their files with Download.com to double-check and make sure that their users are not being taken advantage of unawares, and to follow suit if necessary.

Update (11:05 AM CST): We have just received an email from CNet informing us that they are no longer using what’s officially called “CNET-Installer” for our products. As such, we have no problem linking to the EasyBCD listing on Download.com once again.

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The New Windows 8 Bootloader

Literally the very first thing you notice when installing and testing Windows 8 Developer Preview is the new boot screen. I personally find it to be very cluttered and unorganized, and generally aesthetically unappealing. However, compared to the decades of text-based boot selection menus that people are accustomed to, reviewers are seeing this as a dramatic improvement.

Some of the interesting things we’ve noticed about the new Windows 8 bootloader:

1. The new look
2. Completely new process of loading an OS
3. Integration of repair tools into the bootloader itself

New Look

Hopefully the designers at Microsoft can get their hands on the new boot screen before Windows 8 goes RTM. That said, Microsoft has explained the rationale behind the redesign as being purely function over form – the new boot screen is part of the general overhaul of Windows to use the touch-friendly Metro UI. Microsoft is claiming that the new boot menu is intended to be a more touch-friendly interface – and you can’t really disagree with that, as the appallingly-oversized buttons and labels make it very hard to miss-click “miss-press” with one’s fingers. However, just how many people will be dual-booting on a PC with a touch-only input device, ummm, remains to be seen.

That out of the way, the new boot menu is more than just a visual overhaul, it’s virtually a complete rewrite of the BOOTMGR/BCD bootloader that was first revealed during the Windows Longhorn/Vista beta program. Some of the changes are a little subtle, but the Windows 8 DP builds have introduced some very tricky concepts, evolving the bootloader from just a selection menu to something rather more complicated.

New Boot Sequence

For reasons we have not yet been able to discover, though we are confident they will be revealed in time, Microsoft has chosen to completely change the manner in which operating systems are loaded once selected from the boot menu. The usual boot process that just about any bootloader goes through is something like this:

With Windows 8, this boot process has been changed completely, and now something more along these lines takes place:

It’s a subtle change as the boot menu is not shown the second time around, but the PC actually reboots after making the selection. We’re not clear on why Microsoft is doing this, but if I’d had to hazard a really wild guess, I’d say it’s to clean up the environment that’s been altered/modified/corrupted by the new boot menu. Basically, it seems that the new boot menu interface has become it’s own mini-OS, and is possibly running in protected mode (vs the traditional real-mode bootloader), and as such, needs to reboot to bring the system back into a real-mode that the Windows 8 kernel can initialize from and bring the system from real to protected mode itself. In short: the new boot menu is more of an OS and less of a boot menu than ever before.

Repair Tools Integration

If you were still in any doubt as to just how different the new bootloader was, and how much more of a complete and standalone OS it has turned into, you need look no further than the new repair tools integration. Windows Vista introduced the recovery center, a WinPE-based environment with some tools for both automated and manual repair, on the setup DVD, Windows 7 (in some SKUs and as of certain revisions) copied the recovery center image to the local hard drive and could, if the bootloader itself has not been wiped out, automatically provide an option of loading the recovery center from disk. With Windows 8, Microsoft has gone a step further, integrating the repair tools into the Windows 8 boot menu itself.

As you can see from the screenshots above, the bootloader no longer contains an entry/link to the repair center WIM image, the bootloader and the repair center have instead been merged together. Still, the same problem with the Windows 7 implementation remains: if the bootloader itself has been wiped (which is the most common problem), the recovery center cannot be accessed. In fact, we see no benefits for this implementation over the Windows 7 method, and can only see the drawbacks of enormously-increased complexity and longer load times.

EasyBCD and Windows 8 Developer Preview

Now for what you’ve all been asking: how does EasyBCD play with the Windows 8 Developer Preview? The short answer is, EasyBCD supports Windows 8 DP. The long answer is rather more complicated.

It seems that out-of-the-box, the Windows 8 “pretty” (and we use that word very loosely) boot screen supports only Vista and up. It will not show Windows XP, Linux, or other OS entries (in preparation for Secure Boot? Perhaps). EasyBCD can be installed on Windows 8 (though it will attempt to download the .NET Framework if you haven’t manually activated it, because Microsoft has done a 180 and biting the hand of the developers that powers it, has disabled .NET 1.0 – 3.5 compatibility out-of-the-box in Windows 8), and can be used to add, remove, rename, configure, and generally do whatever you want with entries and the Windows 8 boot menu.

The catch is that as soon as you use EasyBCD, Windows 8 will detect something along the lines of unsupported changes to the bootloader and cease to use the new boot menu / boot screen. It will revert to the Windows 7-style boot menu, including the text-based interface and the original boot sequence. Now, while we personally prefer the older menu, we realize that the majority of Windows 8 DP users are rather anxious to both keep the Windows 8 touch-enabled boot screen and retain usage of EasyBCD’s wonderful goodiness, having apparently never heard of the saying “you can’t have your cake and eat it too.” ;-)

Now we’re not sure how/why the Windows 8 boot menu reverts to the Windows 7 menu, because in fact, it is possible to force the Windows 8 boot menu to add unsupported entries if you use only very particular bcdedit commands; but as even something as minor and unimportant as changing the order of boot menu entries in EasyBCD causes Windows to use the old boot menu, it seems we’re missing something. Rest assured, this will all be taken care of in due time, though at the moment it seems rather folly to waste time trying to implement support for what is clearly the alpha stages of the new boot menu and the appropriate course of action would appear to be waiting for the next Windows 8 beta build (rumored to be sometime around February 2012).

EasyBCD, when used from within Windows XP – 7, can be used to add a Windows 8 entry to the bootloader in the same manner that you would a Windows Vista/7 entry. So, in short, EasyBCD supports Windows 8, but Windows 8 does not support EasyBCD :)

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EasyBCD 2.1.2 supports the recently-released Fedora 16, which is the first Fedora Linux version to feature the usage of GRUB2 (instead of the old Legacy GRUB). EasyBCD has supported GRUB2 for years now, but it required the addition of a new profile with the names and paths that Fedora 16 uses. EasyBCD also has a new homepage at http://neosmart.net/EasyBCD/ which is both prettier and easier to remember.

The full EasyBCD changelog is available in the usual place.

Downloads have been posted for both commercial and non-profit/personal users. We’d like to remind everyone that EasyBCD now requires a paid license for use in commercial or other for-profit environments and purposes. Please don’t forget to press the Google +1 and Facebook Like buttons on the download page below! Also, follow us on twitter @neosmart and like us on Facebook to get the latest updates and news!

Download EasyBCD 2.1.2 1.5 MiB

As always, registered users can download EasyBCD from their user control panel.

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The malware has been purged from our site and resources and there is no longer any threat to our visitors. We’re still working on getting more information, but the malware in question is labeled as JS/BlacoleRef.J and JS/Blacole.A by Microsoft Security Essentials. It’s important to note that visitors to our site could not be infected without their knowledge. The malicious JavaScript in question triggered the browser to display a “do you want to install this plugin” dialog (the exact text differs by web browser make and model), and some browsers were not susceptible to the redirect attack. Users with antivirus software should also not have been at risk, as the malware in question has been blacklisted by the various companies for several weeks now.

We’ve taken steps to prevent this from happening in the future, and while we have yet to determine the method by which the attackers injected this malware into resources on our site, we’ve secured the file permissions to prevent this from happening in the future. Anyone with knowledge about this attack is asked to come forward and help us tie things down further. You can always reach us at support@neosmart.net.

Update (6:30PM CST)

Our site is now in the process of being un-blacklisted by Google and other malware blacklist agencies.

Status of the latest badware review for this site: A review for this site has finished. The site was found clean. The badware warnings from web search are being removed. Please note that it can take some time for this change to propagate

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Some of the changes include nicer icons for all the albums (verses a mosaic of contents), links to full-size images on our extensive collection of tech-related wallpapers, fixing of overall alignment, and a few other cosmetic issues. If you have any suggestions, recommendations, or feedback, please do share because we’re (as always) all ears.

For lovers of beautiful backgrounds, we have two “new” collections to share: the official Windows 8 wallpapers to date, and the OS X Lion wallpapers bundle. We’ll be updating the Windows 8 backgrounds with each released build, so check back often! Some samples after the jump.

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EasyBCD 2.1.1 is the first of our products to be digitally signed! This is fairly exciting news as it was one of the very last finishing touches that EasyBCD (and the rest of our products, for that matter) has lacked over the years. Today, all this changes as we have finally obtained a digital certificate with which we shall be signing all future releases. No more ugly orange warnings when trying to install a NeoSmart product or a nasty red bar when downloading our software with Internet Explorer 9, we can now prove what you’ve all known for years: our products are top-notch quality and absolutely safe and malware-free.

Now, back to EasyBCD. Here are some of the more important changes in this release:

• Fixed: Advanced settings are not available for PE images
• Fixed: EasyBCD can read and write internationalized names for entries!
• New: Added option to auto-load certain BCD path on startup
• New: Much-improved intelligent loading of BTX Bootloader for FreeBSD and PC-BSD

We’ve worked long and hard on creating an entirely rewritten BTX chainloading stack for EasyBCD, working hand-in-hand with the PC-BSD team to perfect the dual-boot process over a period of several weeks (thank you Dru and Kris!). All BSD users should notice a much more streamlined dual-boot process with this release onwards. We’ve also taken the first steps towards full internationalization support for EasyBCD, EasyBCD can now read and write foreign language names and attributes from/to the BCD store.

Download EasyBCD 2.1.1 (1.4 MiB)

The full changelog is available in the usual place. As always, registered users can download EasyBCD from their user control panel.

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All joking aside, synchronization objects such as mutexes and semaphores are essential to safe multithreading and are found on just about any platform under the sun. Mutexes and semaphores alike have one purpose: to keep different threads from messing around with bits and bytes at the same time another thread is, keeping your code free of segfaults and memory access violations alike. But that’s about where the similarities between the synchronization primitives on different platforms end.

POSIX-compliant operating systems with pthreads offer additional really neat synchronization primitives not found on Windows, such as condition variables and read-write locks (the latter is now available on Windows Vista+). And Windows programmers have at their disposal automatic and manual reset events, which make designing certain types of multithreaded software incredibly easy, abstracting away much of the hard-core synchronization logic that lies beneath the hood.

We’ve decided to open source two libraries we’ve found useful in transitioning from Windows development to Linux and from Linux development to Windows. The first (and most important) is an implementation of WIN32 manual/auto-reset events for Linux. While there’s nothing WIN32 events can do that POSIX condition variables can’t, the differences between the syntax and usage semantics of both has resulted in entirely different programming paradigms on the different platforms, making it hard for some developers to port code from one platform to the other or even write code from scratch on the platform they’re unfamiliar with.

Enter pevents. pevents is a C++ library (easily portable to C) for *nix platforms that provides an implementation of WIN32 events on Linux, giving developers access to the CreateEvent, SetEvent, ResetEvent, and WaitForSingleObject functions that make them feel warm and fuzzy inside. More importantly and unlike all the other efforts at porting WIN32 events to *nix in the past, pevents also has support for the all-important WaitForMultipleObjects. WFMO is an important concept in multithreaded programming on Windows, and allows a developer to wait in the kernel until one or more events has fired (or, alternatively, until they have all fired) with a single line of code, resulting in high-performance synchronization waits.

While *nix zealots have long maintained that WaitForMultipleObjects encourages bad programming practices, the fact remains that it can be a powerful tool in the arsenal of a good developer… and any claims that WaitForMultipleObjects is inherently flawed as it leads to the loss of events are outright incorrect statements that only those unfamiliar with correct multithreaded programming on Windows would say. With pevents, Windows developers can feel right at home on Linux/*nix with access to WIN32 events in both manual and auto-reset flavors (MSDN explanation for the uninitiated) with both WaitForSingleObject and WaitForMultipleObjects functions.

On the other hand, *nix developers have long had at their fingertips powerful and lightweight locks adapted for the readers-writers problem (Wikipedia overview). ReadWrite locks (pthread_rwlock_t) are powerful objects that can drastically improve multithreaded performance by allowing unlimited simultaneous read-only access to shared variables while only limiting access to one thread at a time for writing purposes. Microsoft has realized the importance of this over time, and with Windows Vista now has support for read-write locks in the kernel (SRW Locks).

However, as very few developers today are free to target only Vista and above, we have written RWLocks for Windows, a library which provides access to three different flavors of read-write locks, with advanced features not found in either pthread_rwlock_t on POSIX and SRW Locks on Vista such as support for cross-process synchronization, reentrance support, and writer -> reader declination.

Both these libraries are released under the terms of the MIT license and hosted on github. These libraries were developed from the ground-up to be as minimalistic, lightweight and fast as possible (though WFMO requires a bit more overhead and can be disabled at compile-time for better performance). Fork, use, and contribute your changes back. Enjoy!

pevents Linux/OS X/*nix

RWLock for Windows

Please note that these are on-going projects still undergoing development and maintenance. WFMO support in particular is in BETA and can be #define’d out if it’s not required.

Find anything wrong? Drop us an email at neosmart@neosmart.net, comment below, or fork the code at github.

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As someone that’s been using both C/C++ and .NET extensively over the past years, I found there was one very important point that Sutter glanced on, danced around, and did everything short of actually naming in his talk and it’s that if you’re doing anything remotely intricate or complicated, leaky abstractions in managed languages will bite you in the ass, and end up lowering your productivity, some times (and if what you’re working on is truly complicated, often times) to a point where you’d have been more productive using C or C++ in the first place.

The concept of leaky abstractions isn’t anything new and I’m hardly the first to point out how it can turn a knight in shining armor into a harbinger of doom and destruction. It’s the number one problem fundamentally present in almost any framework, but even more so in managed languages where the framework is all you have, and you’re not allowed to side-step it and build your own foundations to work with (p/invoke and interop aside). But lately it’s becoming more and more of a problem as the “push” for innovation that Sutter speaks of has become a fundamental requirement in just about all corners of the industry.

5 years ago, few in the .NET community could tell you what p/invoke was and how you’d use it. Now, it’s considered fairly basic knowledge and a working familiarity with the underlying C WIN32 API is a must for any desktop software developer looking to make a memorable, high-performing product in the world of .NET. Pretty much each and every WIN32 API documentation page on MSDN has a comment from someone on how to import that particular function into .NET with an interop definition, and people are running into the limitations of the managed framework far more often than they used to.

I’m still a big fan of .NET in general as it makes it really easy to quickly jump from idea to prototype to finished product for quick, one-off applications or basic tools and utilities. Even for huge products and projects, .NET’s GUI tools far exceed any C++ offerings in terms of ease-of-use and even functionality when it comes to having standard controls and features a single click away. But the leaky abstractions in .NET are proving to be a real pain in the back, and sometimes even interop just doesn’t cut it for the most trivial and basic of things.

Recently, I hit a wall with .NET in attempting to make EasyBCD support the parsing of internationalized BCD output in the form of bcdedit’s stdout. bcdedit, like many other Microsoft tools and utilities, is only UTF8 or Unicode aware if the console codepage is explicitly set in the application’s console window. I spent an entire day trying to shoehorn this functionality via various .NET hacks and failed interop attempts, a week off-and-on testing and debugging my various incomplete solutions, and in the end my solution was to create a C++ “proxy” application that would create a console, set the codepage to UTF8, run the command line utility, and pipe the output back to the host (source code here, MIT license: UtfRedirect). It was a guaranteed fix, took all of half an hour including testing it on 4 different platforms and experimenting with various internationalized stdout texts.

I personally believe the “best” compromise for medium-sized projects is to use C#/.NET to create the GUI and small helper scripts/utilities, but to build the core in C++ with an exposed C API or commandline interface. The short and long of the matter is, making a language truly and properly productive is a lot more work than just providing a sandbox with prettied-up API calls. You have to organically add improved productivity into a language from the bottom-up, making sure that the productivity goes hand-in-hand with power and flexibility, that it always second fiddle to being able to get the job done; after all, what use is a one-liner code if no mater how you twist and turn you can’t get it to do what you want?

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While each of these fine web browsers has its own way doing things, ranging from keyboard shortcuts to tab management and process handling, they all more or less pull these off a bit nicer than Internet Explorer ever code. But the one Internet Explorer feature I can honestly say I miss when using Google Chrome is the ability to submit the form being currently modified/filled-in with a keyboard shortcut, especially if it works even if there are multiple forms on the screen.

Searching about for a cross-platform solution to this problem, perhaps a previously unknown keyboard shortcut or else some method of assigning a keyboard shortcut that would let Google Chrome intelligently submit the current form via a keyboard shortcut on both Mac and Windows, it became clear that this feature just doesn’t exist for Chrome. Well, as of yesterday, at any rate…

As of today, this feature does exist and it can be yours by just installing Chrome Form QuickSubmit, a Google Chrome extension that will add the keyboard shortcut alt+shift+s on Windows/Linux and cmd+shift+s on Mac to your Chrome, letting you easily and quickly submit the form you’re filling in without needing to resort to tabs, or gasp the mouse:

Google Chrome QuickSubmit 0.2

Again, the keyboard shortcuts are alt+shift+s on Windows/Linux and cmd+shift+s on OS X. These shortcuts do not, to the best of my knowledge, conflict with any others and there aren’t any known issues with this extension. So go ahead, click the link above, authorize the extension, refresh this page, and test it out in the box below!

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