/* Rambling comments... */

June 04, 2005

Code Generation
I've spent much of this week moving from a hand crafted prototype to a code generated version of the same code. The code is all repetitive boiler plate, sort of like the stuff that MIDL generates for you. The code...

June 16, 2005

Catching my breath
I've had a busy few weeks. I'm waiting for a client to come back to me about a quote for some work and whilst I'm waiting I'm putting together a prototype for a product that I'm interested in producing. The...

June 17, 2005

Working on the borders
As anyone who has downloaded any of my code from here, or my company site or CodeProject will know, I have a particular way of doing things. The code I write tends to follow a particular style and as such...

0xFF 0xFE -> CVS -> 0xEF 0xBB 0xBF
My project house-keeping yesterday ended up with a rather strange discovery. I have some test log files that contain Unicode characters and are stored on disk as UTF-16 with the correct 2 byte 'byte order mark' (BOM) header of 0xFF...

Easy interaction testing in C++ with Mocks that create logs
My Unicode Byte Order Mark hassles yesterday were brought to light by one of my mock objects. It was the expected output log for the object that had been converted from UTF-16 to UTF-8 by CVS without asking... Whilst writing...

June 25, 2005

Ok, Roy wins, I'm starting to see the advantage of mocks with expectations
Last week I posted an entry about the simple, hand built, mocks that I use for testing in C++. Whilst I stand by my previous assertion that writing the mocks yourself gives you an further insight into your design from...

Is bloglines always slow?
I've been using SharpReader as my RSS reader for ages. I downloaded a version of it way back when I first got into blog reading and stuck with it because it worked, to a fashion. I ignored the bloaty .Netness...

June 28, 2005

And now for something completely different
One of my clients has asked me to do some investigative work for them in relation to Linux running on a Vortex86-6071LV (a PC/104 format PC which is 386 PC on a board that's around 6" x 4" x 1/2")....

June 29, 2005

2.4.31 Kernel build is go...
As I mentioned yesterday I'm currently playing around with Linux on an embedded PC. Stage 0: was to get a build environmet set up. That's complete now and I have a build of the 2.4.31 kernel running whilst I type...

Travelling at the speed of a floppy drive
This afternoon has been "one of those" afternoons. It started innocently enough when I checked my mail and my cables had arrived. I plugged a floppy drive into the Vortex86 and checked that I could boot off of it into...

June 30, 2005

Showstopper?
Today was "get the Vortex86's SiS 550 graphics card working in graphics mode" day. In summary, I didn't and it's because the LCD is a DSTN one and the current Linux SiS drivers don't support it yet......

Linux's Dll hell?
I've been playing with Linux this week. The last time I played with Linux was back when it fitted on 15 floppy disks; I think I still have the 15 floppy disks in Dad's office somewhere. It's come a long...

So, where's the Unix version of CodeProject?
Software development is hard. Lots of details that are hard to get your head around and harder to simplify. CodeProject is a wonderful resource for Windows programmers where programmers try and make the complicated more simple for others; I view...