 | from David Bolton
So this week I ordered and received in just three days from the States to London, UK, my newest and by far the smallest PC. read about it below. It only draws 5W so is adding nothing to warming my room in a very cold winter! After my next tutorial is published (any day), I will be getting the first iPhone development tutorial written. Now that should be interesting! Have a good week!
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In the Spotlight | My New Linux Box - A Saga
 It is 4 inches x 2 inches x 2.5 inches and has 0.5 GB of ram and 0.5GB of flash ram, draws 5W and is now setup and working. I bought a Tonidoplug and it arrived this week. There was a bit of a tale getting it working which you can read on the blog entry but it has been working nicely since then and I can access it from work. It lets me download or upload files from anywhere and also shows up nicely in Windows Explorer on my local network thanks to Samba. Now I just have to start developing code for it. More on that to come...
| | CBM Emulator and C to 6502 Compiler
Why bother with a single computer emulator when you can support a whole family? VICE is an emulator collection written in C which emulates the C64, the C128, the VIC-20, almost all PET models, the PLUS4 and the CBM-II (aka C610). It runs on Unix, MS-DOS, Win32, OS/2, Acorn RISC OS, BeOS, QNX 6.x, Amiga, GP2X or Mac OS X machines. I learnt programming on a Vic-20 which wasn't much use for anything else having too small a screen and ram (3.5KB!). The 6502 is a very easy assembler to learn with just 69 opcodes. Then I got a CBM-64 and started writing games. A typical game, working full-time on it would take 2-3 months for about 5,000 lines of assembler. Back then tools were primitive and I had to get away from using a cartridge assembler that plugged into the back of the 64. It was fine except when the game crashed and I had to reset the CBM-64 and reload the source code from tape. So I wrote a 6502 Cross assembler running on a Z80 CP/M computer, it was also a handy way to learn to program in Z80. I found cc65, a pretty remarkable free open source C to 6502 compiler with support for what looks like every 6502 computer in existence (Apple II, all CBM models, NES etc) and I've added this to the Free C compiler page. It would be really good if VICE and cc65 were combined into one; a heck of a development and debugging system!
| Free PDF from Microsoft
Microsoft Application Architecture Guide is a 560 page PDF on architecting applications built on .NET. It helps developers and solution architects build effective applications using the .NET Framework more quickly and with less risk. It provides guidance for using architecture and principles. I've never known any software architects, it's a term much hated by house architects who regard themselves as the only people worthy to be called Architect. You could argue that anyone who creates software from scratch, as opposed to just working on an existing application is something of an architect. I see architects as high level, defining the technologies used and overall approach while designers do the lower level design and then developers write the code but there's quite a lot of overlap between these roles. For that reason I regard this book as providing a useful insight for nearly all developers.
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