Classic Entries

Jacob Nielsen has a list of Top Ten Blog Design Mistakes. Number 5 is “Classic hits are buried” where he suggests that it is useful for readers if you list your most ‘important’ entries prominently as well as regularly back linking to earlier posts. This sounds like sensible stuff; until you have to work out what your classic entries are from the other 945* not so classic postings…

Back in 2005 I started this list of classic entries and, strangely, most of the entries on the list are still pre-2005! I think that’s more due to the fact that my writing was more opinionated back then, whereas now it’s more technical, it’s also because most of the entries in the list are still the most popular ones on the blog! Anyway. I’ve now updated the list and added some post 2005 entries…

Classic entries

• [0] - the first entry

• BASI Ski Instructor Training Diary - Content originally published on www.megeveski.com whilst I skiied in Argentina.

• L’Hexapod - Content originally published on www.lhexapod.com whilst I tinkered with robotics.

• Len Learns Rust - Content originally published on www.len-learns-rust.com when I began to teach myself Rust.

• 80 00 1A 00 0F D7 - Bluetooth and OBEX. Lots of comments about how to get various bluetooth devices working with XP.

• Army of muppets - less is more, lots of programmers are crap, don’t stuff your team full of them…

• Assert is evil, except… - my, apparantly controversial, views on the use and misuse of the humble assert.

• Async OpenSSL - integrating OpenSSL with asynchronous sockets.

• Bluetooth Sockets on XP - a simple snippet of code that is currently my most popular posting to date.

• Classic hits - this entry…

• COM is just an interface layer - why you should usually treat COM objects just like any other external system.

• Comment rot - why most comments should be removed.

• CORBA, C++ and Java - a series of articles on CORBA object lifetime management.

• Deadlock detection on Win32 - finding deadlocks, automatically, before they happen.

• Death by debug trace - just like asserts, “debug traces” are often misused.

• Exceptional - why exceptions are not evil.

• Flame on, ooops! - live and learn, some people don’t like to be disagreed with…

• Latest Socket Server code - the latest free version of my server framework.

• OLE DB and ADO - a series of articles on OLE DB. Just say no.

• Practical Testing - a series of articles that shows how to test a gnarly piece of non-trivial, real world, code from my “back catalogue”.

• Refactoring Project, reprise - an entry that summarises what we achieved on the “Refactoring project” a Trade Entry and FX display system based on the “big ball of mud” design pattern.

• Singletons are evil - they inhibit testing, are often simply disguised globals and are used way too often; those GOF guys have a lot to answer for.

• Sri Lanka, my sister and the tsunami - my sister was in Sri Lanka on 26th December 2004, this is her story.

• Why do you code? - because I couldn’t not code.

• Why so much bad code? - thinking, discipline, courage; much code is written without any of these.

• Globals are evil 0 well, given my earlier views I could hardly like them, could I!

• An overview of features of the licensed Server Framework - why you might like to buy my high performance server code.

• Happy Zeroth birthday Scott Holgate! - I have a son!

• STLPort 5.2.1 and VS2010 and x64 - How to build the latest STLPort with the latest compiler…

• Happy Zeroth birthday Max Holgate! - I have another son!

Note that the 945 figure was correct as of 14th September 2017…