Reading Cyrille Berger's blog has been quite interesting lately. He's been slowly plugging away at adding features to Krita, KDE's graphics editor. Krita now has 16-bit color, HDR images, CMYK color space, as well as LAB color. This is stuff that Gimp won't do until GEGL is ready and integrated. Maybe it's time to start dual booting Linux again...
Intel has released pictures of test chips made with its new 45 nanometer process. For those of you keeping score at home, that means it has transitors 4-5,000 times smaller than those on the original 8088. Look at it another way: the 30,000 transistors used in that old chip can now be made to fit in the same space as 6 of the transistors actually used.
45 nanometer is apparently the second generation of Immersion Lithography, which "has its roots in the proven technology of immersion microscopy". My grandfather used oil immersion lenses on his optical microscope (he was a microbiologist) to step up the magnification to x2-3,000.
I've recently spent some time experimenting with the CallNtPowerInformation Win32 API call. If you are not familiar with this call, it's a Windows NT specific call that provides access to the power management related features of the OS. Among other things, it allows the current CPU frequency and battery charge to be retrieved. Like many other Win32 API's, CallNtPowerInformation has a very general prototype (notice the two LPVOID's for input and output):
NTSTATUS CallNtPowerInformation(
POWER_INFORMATION_LEVEL InformationLevel,
PVOID lpInputBuffer,
ULONG nInputBufferSize,
PVOID lpOutputBuffer,
ULONG nOutputBufferSize
);
To use CallNtPowerInformation, the InformationLevel argument specifies one of a number of different possible function codes. Some of these update power management settings, some retrieve current settings, and some retrieve system status values. Based on the function code, you provide input and output arguments via standard structures passed in via lpInputBuffer and lpOutputBuffer.
Where things might start to get odd is when you try to use the ProcessorInformation information level. This information level requires an output buffer of type PROCESSOR_POWER_INFORMATION. However, quoting from the MSDN documentation: "Note that this structure definition was accidentally omitted from Winnt.h. This error will be corrected in the future. In the meantime, to compile your application, include the structure definition contained in this topic in your source code." Peachy.
Being the dilligant programmer I know you are, you will, of course, want to check your return value when you call this function. Believe it or not, things are still wierd. To get the definition of the NTSTATUS typedef, you need to include winternl.h. To get the complete set of return codes, you need to include ntstatus.h. However, if you include both ntstatus.h and windows.h you get warnings about duplicate preprocessor definitions. This is because some of these constants are defined in both header files. To solve this little problem, you need to define WIN32_NO_STATUS before including windows.h and undefine it before including ntstatus.h. This tells windows.h not to define return codes and reenables return code definition for ntstatus.h.
The next problem you're likely to face is the fact that your program fails to link. This is because the powrprof.h does not explicitly specify C function linkage. If you include the header file unadorned in a C++ program, it'll assume C++ linkage, and try to call the API with a mangled name. This does not work, so you're forced to explicltly specify C linkage for the include file. The net result of all these complications might well end up looking like so:
#define WIN32_NO_STATUS
#include <windows.h>
#undef WIN32_NO_STATUS
#include <ntstatus.h>
#include <winnt.h>
extern "C" {
#include <powrprof.h>
}
#include <winternl.h>
I'm not honestly sure why this had to be quite this complicated...
Look, the tech industry is and always will be fucked up. They still
somehow manage to make a semi-usable product every once in a while. My Mac
is slow as a dog, even though it has two CPUs and cost $5000, but I use it
anyway because it's prettier and slightly more fun than the crap Microsoft
and Dell ship. But give me a reason to switch, even a small one, and I'm
outta here.
— Dave Winer.
If you don't know who Dave Winer is, he pioneered the development of outlining software back in the 80's, developed one of the first system scripting tools for the Macintosh, invented XML-RPC, and invented the RSS specification you're probably using to read this blog post. I'm not trying to belittle this guy's point of view, but he's been responsible for developing several major pieces of consumer application software, designed a couple hugely significant internet procotols, and made some signficant money in the process. Most people should be so lucky.