Topics pertaining to software and software development, mostly for Microsoft Windows or Linux, and mostly in C or C++.
A little while ago, I wrote about how I’d started using a version-control system (Subversion) for my source code files. It worked well, but now that I’ve got a really good network-attached storage device (“the NAS” from here on), I wanted to put my repositories on there instead of keeping them on my local drive. …
I was quite surprised, a few days ago, when my official Apple “iPhone Apps” RSS feed came up with something called “InstallerApp 1.0,” because the description says that it’s a way to put iPhone apps that currently require jailbreaking on your unjailbroken iPhone: InstallerApp is a native Mac OS X application that allows you easily …
Continue reading ‘“InstallerApp For Mac Installs Jailbreak Apps Without Jailbreaking Your iPhone”’ »
I’ve long had a vision of the perfect computer storage device. It’s physically small, but holds an absolutely ludicrous amount of data. It’s instantly available to all my computers and other electronics, but I have full control over who can access its contents. And it’s reliable enough that, with the occasional off-site backup, I never …
A tongue-in-cheek rating system for C programmers. (For what it’s worth, I don’t think I’ve ever used three asterisks together in one of my programs. And since I moved to C++, I’ve rarely even needed to use two. I’m always using single asterisks though. I guess I’m only a one-star programmer these days. 😉 )
It’s a curious move, coming from one of the largest software companies in the world, but a welcome one. Yes, it’s a transparent attempt to fight open-source software by getting companies hooked on their product before they’ve grown into the next Google. But it can also help such companies when they need it the most. …
A few days ago, I started getting this message from Pidgin, the instant-messaging client that Ubuntu Linux uses by default: The client version you are using is too old. Please upgrade at http://pidgin.im Well, I’ve seen that happen before, so I waited. Sure enough, that evening’s software update told me that there was an upgrade …
(This entry is for software developers only. If you’re not a software developer, stop reading now, or you risk terminal boredom. 😉 ) As I’ve mentioned before, I wrote a program (which I refer to as Project Badger here) that was sold to a larger company, which keeps my company on call to advise on …
As Bruce Schneier says, “oops.” Encryption is not a silver bullet. How many times do we geeks have to say it? Passwords that can be found in a dictionary (come on, “progress”?!) are ridiculously easy to break. Wake up, people!
A friend and associate, who recently started a potentially-commercial programming project of his own, asked me an interesting question the other day: […] Do you ever find you get discouraged when you try to code something and it doesn’t work, so you try a different way and it still doesn’t work? I’m finding I’m less …
In my recent side-project, Cpp-Markdown, I used a testing suite (developed by the author of another Markdown translator) as a guide to see what I needed to work on next, and to immediately show me when I broke something. It was a very nice way to write code… I could always see progress, and I …