/* Rambling comments... */

July 01, 2005

Currently reading
Just before I dive back into my other project, the one I don't talk about, I thought I'd post a short note about the pile of books that I'm currently reading......

July 07, 2005

Another day learning the Linux way...
My client has decided that we should ignore the video driver problem and press on with the proof of concept using the external VGA screen as a display. So this week was spent learning about building software for a machine...

July 18, 2005

The 'full articles' feed is now feeding full articles again
Seems like I broke it when I added the GoogeAds for that feed... RSS 1.0 (full articles) RSS 2.0 (extracts)...

July 20, 2005

My own legacy code
I've just started work on an ISO8583 server for a client. I've done similar work for them in the past and the first thing that I did was to take the basic shell of the last server that I did...

A single responsibility, please
Having got the CMessageProcessor under test in the last posting. I added a few easy tests for the object and then I came to another hard to add test. The reason that it was hard to add was that the...

What's wrong with my CSS?
My <pre> styling looks OK (to me at least) in IE 6 and horrible (double spaced and strange) in Firefox. Can anyone tell me why?

July 21, 2005

No, that's not the point, and yes, trace logging IS bad
Sahil Malik doesn't agree with Jeremy Miller's description of excessive tracing being a code smell. He suggests a 'neat' way to get around the problem but, IMHO, he's completely missing the point, and I've said as much before. Oh, and...

July 22, 2005

Disappointing .Net Sockets article in MSDN Magazine this month
There's a rather disappointing article on .Net sockets in this month's MSDN magazine....

July 25, 2005

This should be interesting
Richard Hale Shaw is writing some blog entries about moving away from C++ (to .Net). But then he would say that, wouldn't he. His job includes providing courses for people learning .Net... ;) Anyway, I'm sure it'll be an interesting...

July 26, 2005

Blogs as conversations and how blog search can help fill in the gaps
Robert Scoble, and others, are discussing blog search engines at present. It's quite interesting to see that there are lots of different approaches to the same problem. Mary Hodder's article is good in that it explains a bit about the...

Unit testing for speed?
Simon is thinking about using unit testing to help with performance testing. Whilst I've found it useful to use unit tests as very focussed ways to run a profiler on a selection of code I don't think it's a good...

July 27, 2005

Result should be const ? conditional operator : if then else
Simon says; I've stopped using ?: because it isn't as readable as an if .. then .. else. ... I, personally, don't find the readability of the conditional operator (?:) a problem. No more than I find readability of assignments...

Visual C++ 2005 loses single threaded CRT
From C++ Potential. In a posting about changes to the compiler switches in Visual C++ 2005 Brandon mentions that they've removed the single threaded C runtime library options. Does anyone out there use the single threaded CRT anymore? I can't...

Setup and TearDown considered harmful?
I'm glad that Brian Button went to the trouble of writing this post and thinking through the implications of shared setup and teardown code in tests. I've been a bit concerned about some of my tests for a while now....

July 28, 2005

Debugging deadlocks in C++ code with Visual C++
I'm currently adding some functionality to a server that I wrote for a client last year. The server provides application gateway services for them. The new functionality is to switch to using asynchronous connect calls using ConnectEx when it's available...

Whilst on the subject of deadlocks
It must be a deadlock kinda day. Pete McKinstry points to a Java deadlock avoidance scheme which involves knowing and using a total ordering of the locks that you wish to acquire. This is similar to Andrei Alexandrescu's C++ idea...

July 29, 2005

Blog Explosion just doesn't do it for me
I've been attempting to boost the number of people reading this blog in the last few weeks. Mainly because the more people there are reading the more likely I am to get feedback in the form of comments and postings...

July 30, 2005

On the bandwidth wasted by poorly designed spam software
I've been watching my web server logs in real time for the last couple of days, not intently; I do have a few slightly more interesting things to do. I've had a tail of the logs running on the laptop...

Threading flames
Thanks to Ned Batchelder for pointing out the "discussion" about the pros and cons of multi-threaded programming over on the SQLite newsgroup. The comments on Ned's post are well worth reading; they've provided me with a new blog to subscribe...