coding

Whether your pilgrimage tour makes it to Bethlehem or ends up as Mediterranean fish bait may all depend on a credit-card-size keypad designed to prevent hijacked airliners from entering Israeli airspace.

Starting next year, Israel will require all airlines flying into its airports to use a new Security Code System device designed to prevent a 9/11-style attack by identifying commandeered planes before they enter the country's airspace, Reuters reported last week.

Elbit Systems, the company that developed the device, declined to go into technological and procedural detail. But judging by the keypad, it's possible that the pilot … Read more

Of the companies I saw yesterday at the Under the Radar: Mobility conference (more stories), the most audacious, and therefore my favorite, was Zoove. This company makes a service and a technology that allows mobile phone users to dial a short code (preceded by **) and then receive information via SMS or e-mail.

Sounds like SMS short codes, right? But there's a big difference: to get data from the Zoove service, you dial your phone. That is you press a code, like "**coke," then the Talk key. It's just like making a call. Except that instead of … Read more

So close, and yet so far away. Scott Guthrie, General Manager within the Microsoft Developer Division, announced on his blog that Microsoft will be releasing the source code for its .NET Framework libraries with the .NET 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 release in late 2007.

This isn't open source as the Microsoft Reference License which will govern the code release is a "look but don't modify or distribute" license. Still, baby steps for Microsoft. Guthrie writes:

One of the things my team has been working to enable has been the ability for .NET developers to download and browse the source code of the .NET Framework libraries, and to easily enable debugging support in them.

Today I'm excited to announce that we'll be providing this with the .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 release later this year.… Read more

Minnesota authorities have missed a court-imposed deadline for turning over the source code for a breath-testing machine at the heart of a a high-profile dispute that recently made it to the state's Supreme Court.

That means now there's a greater chance that charges could be dropped against third-degree DUI defendant Dale Lee Underdahl.

The next step is a court hearing scheduled for September 19, Underdahl's attorney, Jeffrey Sheridan, told CNET News.com in a phone interview on Tuesday. At the hearing, Sheridan is expected to ask the judge to throw out any evidence the state had obtained … Read more

The presidential crawl back and forth across the country is less of a race and more of a marathon. At this point, there are a lot of candidates on both sides, and likewise an onslaught of news coverage. To help keep track of it all, there's a new site, aptly named Map the Candidates, which does just that. It's a Google maps mashup of where candidates are, and what they're doing in the form of news feeds and video clips.

Each candidate gets an icon to match their campaign branding, and various map markers around the country … Read more

We always suspected that Tokyoflash was run by a bunch of sadists who intentionally create watches that are impossible for us to read. And now our theory has been confirmed: Doing away with any pretense, they've come up with one that requires a secret code to use.

The "Morse Code Watch" has three ways of displaying the time, two of which probably require an advanced degree or training in the intelligence community. Most maddening of all is its audible function, which conveys the time in a series of Morse code beeps from a built-in speaker.

There is, … Read more

Wow. Double wow. I haven't seen Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols this worked up since, well, ever. He could almost be writing for The Register with the way he smacks around Microsoft for its top-25 (most active, mind you) open-source projects on CodePlex. It makes for very fun reading.

It doesn't, however, accurately portray the projects--there are some that actually sound useful and interesting--but I don't want a little (just a little, mind you) accuracy get in the way of a good ol' cage match between Microsoft and SJVN.

My favorite (and probably most apt) comment:… Read more

On Monday, AMD released a proposal for "Lightweight Profiling" instructions (or LWP; download here), describing a new way for software developers to gather information on software while it runs.

I've only had a few minutes to check out the document, but it looks pretty interesting. Existing performance analysis tools, like Intel's VTune and AMD's CodeAnalyst, generally create significant overhead when gathering performance information. They usually need code that runs in supervisor mode, for example, and they're just for developer use--they aren't meant to be used in production systems.

LWP lets applications gather their … Read more