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EDM/2

From the Editor

Written by Carsten Whimster

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  Since last month, I have made some small updates to the RimStar Pro review, so if you are following this editor series, please go back and look through the review. Basically, I didn't stress enough that the higher price of the RimStar Pro editor was due to some high-end features which I didn't review, and so the comparison came across a little lopsided.
The Spanish computer magazine PC Actual now carries EDM/2 on their CD. My Spanish is not perfect, but from what I can gather, this magazine is published 10 or 11 times a year, and will include the newest EDM/2 at the time of the CD publication deadlines, which probably means that the EDM/2 included is 1 month old. The issue can be found in the directory cdactual/demobin/share/os2/edm2/. Unfortunately, the CD does not have long filenames and we do, so the issue is not terrible readable. Fortunately, they also included the zip file, which *is* in 8.3 notation, and in which the files reside unmolested. It is possible that Win95 users can read the issue with long filenames and all, but that doesn't help most OS/2 users. In the July/August issue, you will find a screenshot (extemely wide) of EDM/2 on page 346.
We have started offering online courses. Cruise on over to the new course page, reachable from the top-level index. On this page you will find much information about the offered courses, which at the time of this writing is limited to "Introductory C", run by Björn Fahller. We will soon be accepting registrations, and it will soon get off the ground. Check back often. Links to the online course section are on the front page, and on the table of contents of each issue.
You will also find a new link on the front page and on the table of contents of each issue to The Bookstore. Here you will find long lists of all the books we have reviewed, all the books waiting to be reviewed, and some books we recommend. Next to all the books we have reviewed you will find a link to the review itself. By clicking on the book's name itself, you will find yourself at Amazon.com, where you can purchase the book. If you place the book in your shopping cart immediately upon arriving at Amazon.com (ie. before leaving that page), then EDM/2 will get a small cut of the price of some books. I encourage you to help out EDM/2 in this way, if you are in the market for a book. These percentages probably won't amount to much, but every little bit helps. Finally, you will find a message from Amazon.com in The Bookstore.

Having covered all the commerical editor, the programmer's editor series takes a break this month. Next month, SmallEd will be reviewed as a baseline editor against which others will be compared. SmallEd is well suited for this task, being small, cheap, and having a good, but sparse feature set.
Marco has visited PC Expo and comes back with facts, rumours and more. Read all about the new products and directions for OS/2.
Roman takes a look at keystroke processing in notebooks this month. He tries to solve some of the common problems associated with this area.
Ivan Skytte Jørgensen has written up an article on how to track down and squash memory bugs.
Vincent LaBella present an article on a class he created for allocating memory with the STL class library in OS/2.
Finally, Björn is back with a second installment in the introductory C++ series.

A message follows from Colin of the OS/2 RC5 team:

An OS/2 team has been formed to try to break the RC5 standard 56-bit encryption. So far we are in 3rd place as a team. But other teams are catching up. We are in reach of overwelming the linux group.
If we break the code money will be donated to OS/2 group activities such as "Warpstock".
I'd like to stress, that much worry (from all the questions we get) is about the RAM/CPU/Resources it takes to be involved. The program itself is only around 100k and takes about 200k ram. The priorty is set at the _lowest_ possiple idle rate. I (and others) can not even tell it's running.
Keeping the "buffer" of "blocks" at 50 (the max) will keep network trafic at minimum and will give 25 hours of work for a Pentium100 before the buffers need to be flushed. This is helpful for those that are not always connected to the net, and keeping network trafic at only filling buffers and flushing them. A full buffer (comming or going) for a 50 block "chunk" is 6k.
Please go to the web page for further details at http://www.ionet.net/~colin/rc5.html.

As usual, if you have any suggestions regarding layout, content, and so on, mail me by clicking on my signature below.

Felices vacaciones,

Carsten
 

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