Simple Computing

A paraphrase of Asimov's first law of robotics: A program shall not harm a user's data or through inaction allow a user's data to come to harm. Every software engineer should take this to heart when designing a program. A user's data (or content) is sacred. Under no circumstances should it ever be lost -- especially due to a failure of the program.

This past year has seen some modest progress in the world of Liberty Basic: Carl published a book titled Beginning Programming with Liberty BASIC . This is a great book -- I read it from cover to cover. Even if you're an experienced programmer, it is a fast way to get the gist of the language and you may even pick up a few new things along the way. Liberty Basic 4.04. This release offers better compatibility with Windows Vista and 7. It also fixes some bugs. I think it will be the last release of the 4.x version. Liberty Basic Pro. This is just 4.04 and Assist combined into a single product. Hopefully 2011 will be the year of Run Basic.

I ran into a problem recently where Windows Vista kept using up all of my available disk space for System Restore and Shadow Copy storage. There is a feature in the Disk Cleanup utility that lets you manually delete all but the most recent snapshot. I did that for months before I finally took the time to figure out how to set the limit. My problem was pretty extreme. My HP Pavilion laptop has a 105 gig disk drive. I have about 47 gigs free and over a period of about a month, Vista would use it all up. Vista is supposed to use only 15% of the hard disk for this storage, but apparently sometimes that limit can become UNBOUNDED. I don't know how that happens. To see the current setpoint for your system, go to a command prompt and type the following: vssadmin list shadowstorage You should see something like the following: To change the current setpoint for your system, type the following but change what's necessary to match your system. For example, you may need to change the drive...

The new Run BASIC hosting service launched at midnight! Please visit http://runbasichosting.com for more details. Monthly and annual subscriptions are available. Run BASIC , a product by ShopTalk Systems, is a tool that makes it easy to create your own web applications. No computer science degree required . Run BASIC Hosting is a service that makes it easy to deploy your applications to the Internet. No IT experience required .

The launch date for the world's second Run BASIC hosting service is officially set for Monday, January 18th 2010. Details are available at http://runbasichosting.com .

The first Run BASIC Hosting Service at http://runbasicnet.com shutdown a few months ago. This happened just before I realized that I needed a hosting service for my own applications. If it shutdown a month later, I may have become one of Jerry's last customers. Personally, I don't want to rely on a server running in my home connected to the Internet through my Comcast cable modem. I know a lot of people do that and it's the cheapest way to go, but I did some testing and found that I have service interruptions almost every day. They are usually short and during the night, though. Plus, there are the occasional major outages both in cable service and power that usually happen during winter months or in bad weather. I live in Atlanta, so this doesn't happen often, but it's still often enough. Last month, I purchased a subscription for my own VPS (Virtual Private Server) at VPSLand. I also started wondering if anyone else in the Run BASIC community would like to have ...

I published a new book titled Embedded Software Development with C . I am a co-author along with Dr. Kai Qian and Li Cao. The book is published by Springer. It is a computer science textbook written primarily for CS and EE undergraduate students, but it is also a good introduction for working professionals interested in embedded software development. Hobbyists will also like the projects and step-by-step approach to the labs. The book takes a software engineering approach to programming the venerable 8051 microcontroller using the C language. The 8051 and C have been around for decades, so this book should have some long term value. It stands out from other 8051/C books because it covers Ethernet networking. Most 8051 books on the market don't make it past serial communications. Writing this book took me back 20 years to my EET days. I haven't bread-boarded circuits since the late 80's. It was a lot of fun designing the labs and making them work. The Ethernet chapter featur...