Want to build some small/or not, neat Windows/or Linux application on your Mac? Just use MinGW/Linux GCC cross compiler package from Pierre Molinaro. Those were recently updated to GCC 4.2 and do cross-compile really fast, especially when using make -j2.

It is hard to be Switcher and totally forget/abandon Windows projects, since most of my clients… well almost all of them are on *indows. So since I switched, I am constant user of VMWare Fusion + XP (Win7, Win98) as a guest OS having Visual Studio installed inside. But sometimes if you want to create small cute application for *indows I prefer do it 100% on Mac with TextMate, then just test it on Windows. This is what MinGW cross compiler is perfect for. Not to mention I did Miranda’s MinGW Makefile that successfully builds miranda on Linux/Mac using cross-compiler, so it can be queued for nightly builds on SF.net servers.

How to survive computing paradigm shift

We cannot count on free “performance lunch” anymore, but how about at least a pie for free? Do we need to throw all our old source-code into the trash bin and start over again? 

Certainly, not. We may think of our old software as a zombie of the new multi-core era. Still there is a way to make the zombie walk, even walk faster. Of course we will need to rewrite our code sometime, but we may postpone this nasty need for a while. 

The computing paradigm shift is now a fact we need to learn how to live with. It is unquestionable that processor manufacturers hit the barrier of 3 GHz. There pretty many news about spinning the CPU up to 5 GHz or so, but do not try to do so at home unless you got liquid nitrogen cylinder around. Over 3 GHz heat emission grows unreasonably making the CPU economically worthwhile. 

So the only sensible way is now horizontal performance improvement, doubling the number of processing units. This means we can expect soon 128 core CPUs. Oh, wait they are here already; nVidia GeForce 9 series are perfect example of 128 core streaming processor. 

Now how to keep up with things that happen so fast. First we need focus more on performance of our code. Something that was not important before, now cannot be ignored.
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After spending few years using WordPress, MODx, PHPnuke I found out those systems getting more and more complicated, well yes sophisticated too, but first of all complicated. Anyway, feeling that this is not right direction I have decided to rewrite something by my own; simple, but powerful enough to provide functionality that you expect from most of the modern sites – blog, forums, RSS feeds.

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After a while I had put the jabberd2 win32 project aside, finally I have revived it. Here are some news about it:

• Project files and binaries were upgraded to Visual Studio 2008 (SP1).
• Installer now checks the runtime properly on Windows Vista & Windows 7 Beta, was tested also on Windows XP & 2003. Moreover since Visual Studio 2008 runtime seems to be present by default on many machines, most of you will not need to install it manually at all.
• Installer now contains OpenSSL 0.9.8j, so no more problems with OpenSSL external installation.
• … finally we got all the fixes and features introduced in jabberd2 till the revision #752.

Once you upgrade, you may uninstall Visual Studio 2005 Runtime and OpenSSL using Add/Remove Programs if you have them installed just for older jabberd2 win32 build.