http://www.macrobug.com/blog Macrobug Blog Thu, 21 Aug 2008 10:34:56 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en There's an updated version of the Stray Event Scanner tool available from the download page. Release notes can also be found there; mostly they're to do with improvements to the command-line version of the tool. http://www.macrobug.com/blog/2008/08/21/stray-event-scanner-1019-released/ As I mentioned, about a week ago I visited a customer site to find out if our Stray Event Scanner tool actually did the trick, on their codebase. That customer has kindly said I can post some results here. Results were mixed! Proportion of this customer's codebase scanned5% (estimate). False positives reported by ... http://www.macrobug.com/blog/2008/08/19/results-of-stray-event-scanner-evaluation-at-a-customer-site/ One of the things which would make Macrobug's life much easier is if Symbian OS had DTrace or an equivalent. DTrace is a dynamic tracing framework which allows arbitrary APIs and function calls to be instrumented at run-time without any changes to any code. That way, the Macrobug tools would ... http://www.macrobug.com/blog/2008/08/18/dtrace-is-very-good/ PIPS is Symbian's newish POSIX API layer. On the whole it's pretty good; the APIs work well, although there is not much support for "related issues" such as building using GNU autoconf, link-by-name, and interfacing with other Symbian code. However, PIPS 1.3 doesn't work on Motorola phones. This means a customer ... http://www.macrobug.com/blog/2008/08/15/pips-on-motorola-z8/ The Carbide.c++ team has released the first Milestone release of Carbide.c++ 2.0. There are two interesting things about this release. The first is that an indexer bug has been fixed to work with templated types. Symbian OS descriptors are usually templated types, and so this is a big deal. It means a ... http://www.macrobug.com/blog/2008/08/13/carbidec-and-qt/ This clears up a few bugs, displays the conditions more nicely, and makes things quicker. Use Carbide's built-in software update to fetch the new version. http://www.macrobug.com/blog/2008/08/10/new-release-of-stray-event-scanner-tool-1018/ A customer has given me a contract to deploy my tools on their codebase, to see whether they come up with useful results. After that, maybe they'll talk about licencing the tool... very exciting! But of course I've failed to fix all the things I had wanted to fix in ... http://www.macrobug.com/blog/2008/08/10/off-to-demonstrate-tomorrow/ I'm still working on fixing the remaining known problems in Macrobug's Stray Event Scanner. I don't intend to try to make it perfect - because, when understanding code, there's always an exponential effort required to understand the rarest features. For example, the tool will never support the C goto keyword where ... http://www.macrobug.com/blog/2008/07/15/tough-bugs/ Macrobug is proud to present its first product for actual sale: the Stray Event Scanner. This is a source code analysis tool which does one thing, and does it well: it finds the causes of the dreaded Stray Event panic. Why are they dreaded? Well, by the time the crash ... http://www.macrobug.com/blog/2008/07/09/stray-event-scanner-launched/ If you're a Symbian OS device creator (that means, you make phones) you'll want to read this paper. It includes interesting statistics about which crashes occur most often during the device creation process, and tips about which products can identify them early using source code analysis. Of course, the conclusion ... http://www.macrobug.com/blog/2008/07/09/crashing-how-not-to-do-it/