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Russell Duffy wrote:
Finally, the ignorant software question. If you look at the options for the FJO system, you'll note that there's an expensive connectivity and data logging kit listed separately. The good news is that as of Feb 1st, that kit is included at no extra charge with the wideband controller kits. The bad news is that the software won't run on my Pocket PC. What they said exactly was "the software only supports the PC platform and has not been ported to the Pocket PC" . I've heard the term "ported" in regards to making software work with other platforms, but I don't quite know what this entails. Is it possible for the average software geek to convert this software for use with the Pocket PC, or is it something that only the original programmers could do? I also suspect that it might be illegal to do this even if you can, unless they gave permission for it. It would be cool to be able to data log MAP, RPM, and O2 in flight, but the only way I have to capture the data is the Ipaq. Cheers,
Rusty (engine will be re-installed this weekend)
Rusty, we programmers write is source code. A list of human readable instructions that tell the computer what to do in exsquisit detail. Unfortunately, computers can't read. You have to feed your source code to a 'compiler' that converts demi-english source code to machine code.
In it's simplest form, the process of 'porting' is compiling the source code for a different platform.
Things are never simple. First, so that the programmer of an application doesn't have to program every single little detail, a lot of routines that everyone has to do are collected and put in one place, called libraries. So now instead of having to say, "Which device is the hard drive? Look at the hard drive. Find the first sector of the directory tables. Read in the directory for the sector tables.....(etc)...read in first sector of file", I can just say "open(file)". The operating system provides a lot of these libraries, but they can come at you from anywhere. Each platform will have a different set of libraries. Win95 is slightly different from Win98 is slightly different from WinXP is quite a bit different from PocketPC, and then you graduate to real operating systems like Linux that are an alien lifeform. What do you do when you had that nifty library function that would do all your graphing task for new, and the new system doesn't have it (meaning that you have to write all the functions yourself)?
Another problem is that not all computers are created equal. The PocketPC may not even HAVE a hard drive. What ya' gonna' do now? Huh? It'll have a different screen size. If the programmer expects to display a dialog with 17" of screen real-estate, what ya' gonna' do when you only have 6"? Then there is the more basic question of how do you add 16bit numbers on an 8bit computer, using a 2bit operating system. Will it perform quickly enough to be worth having.
Porting is the art of handling all that stuff. The average software geek is smart enough to run away from these sort of task in a screaming panic (unless, he expects to be paid fairly well).
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