Topics pertaining to software and software development, mostly for Microsoft Windows or Linux, and mostly in C or C++.
As a software developer, I have occasionally been tempted to put… um, “colorful” language… in my source code and comments, especially about whatever vagaries of the OS API that I’ve just spent several days locating and working around. I generally manage to suppress the urge, because it’s rather embarrassing when you go to share or …
Over the last week or so, I’ve been working on a test program for Project X. The requirements pretty much dictated a GUI solution, but while I work primarily under Linux, the other developer on it works primarily in Windows, and we use both C++ and Lisp for this project. Any programmer who’s tried to …
He-LLO, Steve! Security through obscurity doesn’t work! How many times do we have to be burned by your software before you learn that?
Everyone has been waiting for Vista SP1 to come out, thinking that surely it will fix all of the problems that Vista has (like running many programs at half the speed on the same hardware). Well, it doesn’t seem to make a lick of difference: Bottom Line: If you’ve been disappointed with the performance of …
E-mail is a wonderful invention. I’ve been using it since 1987 or thereabouts, when one of my uncles gave me a 300 baud acoustic modem that I could plug into my Sinclair QL, and I discovered the local FidoNet node. However, this wonderful innovation started becoming a burden about a decade ago — that’s when …
Last weekend I ported some MD5 calculation code to Lisp, for practice. But once it was done, I wasn’t happy with it, so I’ve been improving it since.
My company is still on contract to help out with a program we developed, which another company bought a few years ago. I’ve spent part of the last two weeks working with that company’s lead programmer, trying to track down a minor but particularly pernicious intermittent bug involving TCP/IP, multithreading, and what seemed to be …
Continue reading ‘Multithreaded Programs on Multiprocessor Systems’ »
I ran across this post today. It’s more than a year old, but it’s still quite valid. I discovered the joys of unit tests a couple years ago, when I was developing an internal library of C++ classes and functions. Every time I made a change, I would run the test code for the library …
Continue reading ‘“Twelve Benefits of Writing Unit Tests First”’ »
Over the weekend, I wanted to get in some Lisp practice — especially with macros and debugging — so I decided to port my MD5 calculation code (written in C++) to the language. It has a lot of repetitious code in it that could usefully be handled by macros.
I ran into a frustrating programming problem today, and one that I’d really like to find a solution to.