Category Archives: Software

Meeting the Founder of VCS.de

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SciSys acquired last year VCS by paying €16.64 million. Today I got to meet Prof. Dr. Klaus-G. Meng, the company’s single founder, that started VCS in 1981.

He told the initial history of VCS, how he started the company, etc. Basically he knew how to receive a signal from satellites and designed a receiver that was capable of monitoring the signal. Back then this was great technology. The European Space Agency was using paper prints that came out every X number of minutes so going to a system where they had live feedback of the signal on a TV was considered something very useful. His first client was precisely the Agency but soon after Lufthansa and other big companies were interested as well.

The first thing I asked was: wasn’t this easy enough to be done by other companies? Did you had strong competition? He said no because it was a niche market. The bigger companies were interested in bigger markets like medicine, etc.

He ended up doing a tour with us through the office, which was brilliant! The building used to be an abandoned school and maybe that’s why it is so functional inside. There are rooms for 1, 2 or 3 persons instead of an open-space, which reminded me more of a university environment than a software company.

Placing Blame Where Blame Belongs

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Google is releasing a new browser. Here are some of the new features and things that caught my eye from the comic book they’ve launched about it:

Isolated Tabs

Each tab is a separate process. If a tab crashes you don’t loose the whole browser. Better garbagge collection because when a tab is closed a whole process is cleared from memory.

Testing

“Within each 20-30 minutes of each new browser build, we can test it on tens of thousands of different web pages.”

Speed: Webkit and V8

Based on Webkit, memory efficient and easy to adapt to embedded devices, and based on V8 that only interprets Javascript once and then compiles it to machine code. Better garbage collection by keeping a reference of where all the pointers are on the stack.

Search and User Experience

Tabs are on top instead of being below the URL bar. Tabs can be detached. Each tab has its own controls. Autocomplete works only on sites you’ve typed already and points only to the root site, not the whole address.

The initial page presents the nine most visited sites by you on the last days.

Privacy mode lets you create tabs where nothing that happens on that window will be logged.

Pop-ups are scoped to the tab where they were created.

Security, Sandboxing and Safe-browsing

Each tab, which is a process, is jailed. No writing to disk occurs. Blacklisting for harmful sites and phishing attempts.

Gears, Standars and Open-Source

Has Gears built into. All of it open-source.

Update: So this guy is saying Chrome is over twice as fast compared to Firefox 3, and not far from being twice as fast as Safari 4/WebKit nightly.

Since it is Webkit based it will have the same implementation for CSS as Safari does for example. And Webkit scores 100/100 in the Acid3, a test to check how well a web browser follows certain web standards.

Seems Chrome is planned to launch at 18:00 GMT.

Adventures in the GNU PDF World

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Recently I’ve meet the maintainer of the GNU PDF Project, a colleague of Ana’s, and once he told me about the project and its goals I thought it was quite interesting. My first thoughts were why another PDF project? Haven’t people solved that problem already? There’s a motivation page and there has been questions and answers about this on the project’s mailing list so I can’t explain it better than they do but one thing that seems important to me is the PDF 1.7 specification that the project wants to implement. That means having features in the free software world that are only available now in proprietary software, like interactive forms in a PDF.

It’s a very recent project, still with a small codebase and considered by the Free Software Foundation as a high priority project. Be sure to check it out, maybe it is that free software project you have been wanting to contribute in a while.

Beautiful Software

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Beautiful software is one that does things that you don’t expect and things that are actually useful for you in some way (e.g. that reduce the effort for the task that you have in mind).

I can think of at least three examples of such software:

  • Mozilla Firefox – It’s plugin-based architecture and its capacity to update, etc. makes it a great piece of software. The tools that the community around Firefox created (XUL Runner, XPCOM, etc.) make an excellent base to develop other great desktop applications.
  • Gcc – the GNU compiler collection is a hardcore piece of software. Maybe one of the most complex pieces of software available today as open-source and with such brilliant minds working on it.
  • WordPress – this open-source blog engine is a wonderful web application. It also has a architecure based on core+plugins and has capacity to update, themes, etc. It makes an excellente base to develop other web-based applications.