Category Archives: Software

WaitForMultipleObjects and WIN32 events for Linux/OS X/*nix and Read-Write Locks for Windows

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
11

As every programmer worth his salt knows, synchronization primitives form the very building blocks of multithreaded programming. Without them, the world as we know it would cease to exist and chaos would reign free and unchecked.

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.

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My Thoughts on Sutter’s “C++ and Beyond 2011”

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
5

Around a month ago, Herb Sutter gave a talk on why C++ is once more gaining relevance in the world of programming, and how after a decade of neglect and abandonment, it is set to pave the way into the future. I downloaded it a while ago and finally had a chance to watch it last night; the talk itself is most-excellent and is around 40 minutes long, you can stream it online or download it in a higher-resolution format on Channel 9. Or click below to watch:

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.

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Google Chrome Form QuickSubmit

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
4

As a long time user of Google Chrome (since the very first day of its release, as a matter of fact), I’ve quickly grown accustomed to some of the Chrome way of doing things. Before Google Chrome, I used Opera and before that Firefox and Firebird – and only before those, Internet Explorer.

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…

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Microsoft plays the blame game fast and loose with Internet Explorer 10 and Windows 8

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
15

Yesterday, Microsoft made available the first public beta of Windows 8. The developer preview can be downloaded on the Microsoft website, and has received plenty of media coverage and has been the subject of much scrutiny and review. However, in our testing of Windows 8 for compatibility with NeoSmart software and products, we came across a rather, shall we say, interesting approach that Internet Explorer 10 now takes to its crashes. With Windows 8, as with previous versions, when an application hangs or crashes, an error reporting dialog is displayed prompting the user to select an action to take with the crashed program.

What’s different with Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10 is that Microsoft chooses to deflect the blame from itself, and pin it instead on the unfortunate owners of the website that the user had last visited. In the following screenshot, Internet Explorer 10 has crashed after being unable to handle some of the web scripting on our website. Except instead of the error dialog you would expect (something to the effect of “Internet Explorer has stopped responding,” an error caption which we are all familiar with and of which the web is full), the error dialog instead reads:

neosmart.net is not responding.

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Windows Recovery Discs Updated, Reinstated

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
56

Download Now

Windows Recovery Disk Screen

Almost four years ago, NeoSmart Technologies published a Windows Vista repair and recovery CD that could be used to treat common boot issues and recover from catastrophic system failure in case you didn’t have a Windows setup CD handy.

Windows XP Logo Over the years, we’ve added more recovery CDs to the collection, ending up with a complete portfolio of repair CDs for Windows Vista and Windows 7 in both 32- and 64-bit flavors. We’ve had the good fortune of being able to host these CDs on our site in one form or the other for free download to millions of users around the globe.

Three months ago, we were contacted by the legal department at Microsoft Corporation asking us to discontinue hosting these files. Until this point, we were not aware that Microsoft was displeased with our hosting of the CDs and in fact enjoyed a rather healthy relationship with the Microsoft support forums where victims of PC crashes would be directed to our site to download a copy of the repair CDs.

Since then, we have been in talks and negotiations with the Microsoft legal and licensing divisions, trying to work out a method whereby we could provide our users and visitors with access to these CDs once again. Today we’re excited to announce that these CDs are once more available for download!

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Irony from Google Plus…

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
14

I think we’re on a roll here with picture blogging, but here’s another. This one is from Google+, the newly-launched social network hoping to take a chunk out of Facebook’s dominance in this market.


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EasyBCD 2.1 and Some Big Changes

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
22

EasyBCD LogoFor all our loving users, readers, and members out there, EasyBCD 2.1 has just been released and is ready for consumption. Freshly baked, tenderly prepared, and lovingly made, it brings the usual host of new features and updates that a new version of EasyBCD usually brings.

Use our Windows recovery disks to:
✓ Fix all boot errors
✓ Resolve startup BSODs
✓ Restore registry and settings
✓ Clean up virus infections
Easy Recovery Essentials is available for Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8. Windows XP and Windows Server editions are also supported.
Download Easy Recovery Essentials

But this build of EasyBCD is a little special — we focused a lot more on improving the user experience over adding new features. We’ve fine-tuned every line of text, every button, every icon. We’ve hidden all we can hide, automated all we can automate, but never at the cost of advanced options; instead, everything is just that much smarter and more intelligent, cutting out the extra steps that left room for confusion. Simply put, EasyBCD 2.1 is all about smoothing out the edges of what has become the world’s most popular bootloader utility.

With EasyBCD 2.1 also comes some exciting changes from the developmental side of things. As you all may or may not know, development at NeoSmart Technologies has largely been a one-man show, with Mahmoud doing the coding and research, with help from an amazing team of moderators (chief of which are Terry, Justin, and Peter) providing most of the ever-important tech suport on our forums. What most people don’t know is that while NeoSmart Technologies has, alhamdulilah, reached epic heights over the past few years, it’s being run entirely on a part-time basis by all of its volunteers.

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Gevey Sim and iOS 5 Unlock

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
32

iOS 5, WWDC 2011

UPDATE: iOS 5 Beta 2 and up!

Gevey unlock (and other turbo-sims/interceptors) do not work on iOS 5 beta 2 and above, including the final iOS 5 release!

Yesterday at WWDC 2011, Apple announced (amongst many other things) iOS 5, the upcoming version of iOS that’s to be released with the iPhone 5 later this year. iOS Developers and certain tech bloggers have been given access to this build, and we’re sure one of the biggest question the hordes of iPhone users around the world are asking is: Will my Gevey-3G unlock SIM interposer work???

With iOS 5 beta (build 9A5220p), the modem firmware has been upgraded to baseband 04.11.04 and cannot be downgraded to earlier versions, meaning the only possible SIM unlock would be a turbo sim/interposer (currently either Gevey-3G or Rebel SIM); hence the worried and nervous questions going around the online iPhone community.

And the answer? A relieving yes. At least for now, for iOS 5 beta 1, it does. The process remains unchanged — just insert the interposer, restart your device, accept the welcome message, dial 112, and toggle the Airplane Mode feature a few times. The Gevey SIM will still work to unlock iOS 5.0 beta.

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TEDx Talk: This is stupid, there has to be a better way!

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
Reply

A copy of my talk at TEDxDeadSea last month is now available on the TEDxTalks channel at YouTube.

The premise is finding new ideas for startups and “entrepreneurships” based on the concept of “this is stupid, there has to be a better way.”