Benton Stark’s Blog

One of the new features of Windows 8 is a new Windows API layer called WinRT or Windows Runtime.  The concept of WinRT is to modernize various Windows API’s that require the coder to know certain C style data types such as LPARAM or the various pointer types and data structures that the Win32 API supports.  But apparently WinRT is not just a new interface to Win32, it also includes other interfaces into other APIs such as WPF and COM.  The NET 4.5 Framework is reported to use the new WinRT layer to make calls to Windows instead of the current P/Invoke method call.

Now for the confusing part.  It appears some but not all of the .NET Framework classes will be embedded into WinRT as “sealed” classes.  It seems the purpose of this is to give non .NET language users (e.g. Javascript) that want to program to WinRT some of the same functionality presented in the .NET Framework.  That is a bit confusing and it will be a little challenging for Microsoft to manage yet another subset of the Framework libraries.  If you remember, Microsoft has done this before with Silverlight (which is only 4 years old).  And the future of Silverlight does not look terribly bright for Silverlight developers (pun intended).  Microsoft states that “…WinRT is the provider of all Windows system services to interpreted code.”

So, why the new API?  Is this yet again another wrapper that attempts to make development on the Windows platform easier?  Does this help Microsoft decouple the operation system from developer applications?  Maybe.  But it looks like this might really be about developing Windows apps for smaller devices.  There are many languages to choose from when writing mobile apps and to complete Microsoft appears to be offering a one-stop-shop API of sorts for developers who target Microsoft running on smaller devices and tablets (Metro style).

So, this is an interesting new API but you might want to proceed with caution as Microsoft has a habit of introducing a lot of layers only to later produce another layer to encapsulate that layer that is not longer in favor or simply abandon it for some other corporate strategy.  WinRT wrapping COM and XAML is a case in point.

Have you found yourself listening to the executive or top management team at your company only to be confused by jargon or endless strings of verbs and adjectives?  Well, apparently you are not alone.  Fobes Magazine has put together a list of some of the most common executive jargon and poor sentence construction.

This past week Stanford expanded the number of free college computer science courses to be offered this winter to include courses on Entrepreneurship, Technology Entrepreneurship, Anatomy, Making Green Buildings, Information Theory, Model Thinking, CS 101, Machine Learning, Software as a Service, HCI, Natural Language Processing, Game Theory, Probabilistic Graphical Models, Cryptography, Design and Analysis of Algorithms I and Computer Security.  This announcement follows the amazingly popular free AI class that is wrapping up in the next few weeks.  Over 180,000 people signed up for the free AI class.

These classes are available to anyone over the web for free.  Anyone can sign up regardless of geographic location.  The AI class has two tracks.  One that includes homework assignments and grades exams and the other that does not include the exams.  Students that complete the assignments and grades can earn recognition and the top students can earn the status of beating out their contemporaries.   These classes do not count for college credit but they are taught by the same top professors that teach the Stanford computer science students on the same schedule.

In the world of computing not all computers are created equal.  Inside your modern PC, laptop, server, or tablet are a multitude of specialized chips that are computers all unto themselves.  One of these special devices is your video card which has one or more Graphical Processing Units on it (GPU).

Nvida has released a programming tool kit called CUDA which allows for software developers to gain access to the Nvida GPU directly to do very fast, general purpose parallel programming.  In particular these cards are amazingly good at matrix based mathematics and can easily outperform a CPU in these types of operations.   Most software developers will not need to access their Nvida GPU directly but there are some interesting uses for this highly specialized computational power.  New college courses are designed to explore the power of the GPU for solving scientific and business problems that can be solved using the power of parallel processors.  In fact, larger machines utilizing thousands of GPUs have been envisioned.  Nvida has seen this a potentially new market for their processors by offering the power of a supercomputer for your PC.

Other APIs such as the OpenGL Shader Language (GLSL) have been created to give software developers universal access to a wide variety of GPUs and CPUs in a standardized way.  But OpenGL is designed for graphical use.  To solve this problem more specific mathematical APIs such as OpenCL and WebCL have been created to address this need.

Finally Stanford offers a free college class on parallel programming.  The class spends time getting familiar with the CUDA API.

For more information on using your GPU for doing fast math check out the following site.

http://www.clustermonkey.net/content/view/248/33/1/0/

There are several stories out in recent months concerning cheating both inside the US and outside the US on standardized undergraduate and graduate school admission exams for the US.  In addition, some students are having no problem getting their home schools to falsify secondary school records to boost their chances at admissions in a US college.  Many of these foreign students use recruiters who charge big dollars in their home land.  Such students are more than willing to pay full tuition to go to a US school.  These students are a boon for colleges that are in need of revenues as budgets and investments take a hit due to the economy.  But such falsification undermines the ability of US students from being admitted into programs and creates a hyper-competitive climate that isn’t real.  This is particular difficult to understand for state funded schools whereby a large part of the university budget is funded by state tax revenues.  At the same time there are numerous articles calling for concern that the US is losing it’s edge in technology innovation by not graduating enough STEM students from universities.  Sadly, many of our recent STEM graduates that are not from the top schools are struggling to find work.

Such conditions add insult to injury for recent college graduates that are faced with the highest tuition debt of any generation.  Some are doubling down and going to graduate school only hoping the economy will be better when they get out.  And the nation’s top computer science schools are bracing for record applications as people flock to the few industries that show some sign of life.  Stanford saw a 83% increase in declared computer science majors over the past 3 years.

All in all, foreign student enrollment is at an all time high at US campuses.   In particular the number of Chinese students increased by 43 percent among undergraduates according to the report released this month by the U.S. State Department and the not-for-profit Institute of International Education.   Cheating on the computerized version of the GRE was so widespread in China that the computerized GRE was not allowed from the years 2002 until June of this summer.  Only time will tell how the new version of the GRE fares in a world where intellectual property rights are not respected and bribery is simply a way of life.

But I should not pick only on Chinese students as Indian and South Korean students have also been implicated in falsifying transcripts, TOFEL scores and recommendations.  But there are also American students who are willing to cheat in these competitive times.   All in all it simply creates a climate of unobtainable scores that make have been unhinged from reality while displacing honest students out of the system.  This does not benefit the country in the long term and is a trend we should all be concerned about as a nation.

So I have received several recommendations to list my projects on Codeplex.com which is a kind of Microsoft controlled Sourceforge of sorts.  But there is a lot of controversy around Codeplex and what Microsoft’s game plan is concerning open source software.  Richard Stallman is understandably cautious about Codeplex and Microsoft’s motives.  On the other hand, Codeplex is promoted by Microsoft and those developing in Visual Studio might be more likely to search for an open source project on Codeplex than say Sourceforge or Google code.

So, I did a experiment and released the Starksoft FTP/FTPS project on Codeplex.  I will see how it works out before releasing any other projects to Codeplex.  After one week in I have received a modest response.  Time will tell if this is a viable open source registry or just another Microsoft political project.  For the time being I will continue to keep my source code at Google and all my forums and other documentation here on the Starksoft site.

So, I am in the process of adding new features to the Starksoft FTPS component library.  If you have additional feature requests please add them to the issue log. Currently the features and bug fixes I plan to implement are as follows.

• Add support for Implicit SSL
• Fix thread synchronization for SSL connections.  Some connections are dropped due to this bug.
• Provide better byte transfer statistics.
• Fix IPv6 addresses being sent as an IPv4 address.
• Add IPv6 support for Passive and Active transfers.
• Fix the Monitor thread from running beyond it’s life span with asynchronous operations.
• Fix FileExists() error for files in the root directory.  This bug is causing some files to be falsely reported as not present when they do in fact exist.
• Provide better MoveFile() instructions so that users understand that the MoveFile() method may not work with all FTP servers.
• Fix fragmented responses due to data being read too soon by the Monitor thread.
• Add handling of UTF-8 encoding for directory listings.
• Package NUnit testing into the release.

Things I plan not to include

• Support for DrFTPD and glftp.  Apparently the component cannot connect to these FTP servers via Explicit SSL.

Thanks for the feedback!

The Starksoft web site is undergoing many changes with a new forum, blog and wiki.  The entire suite of tools is all open source running on the lower power Ubuntu PlugComputer platform which is about the size of a cell phone charger.  The next step is to begin documenting the Starksoft tools for easier use.  Enjoy!