So I have to develop on a *nix box through a Windows desktop PC. Plain terminal emulation is no fun (who wants to develop in vi?). Through the magic of open source, I don't have to and neither do you! Here are the simple steps to follow:

1. Install Cygwin including Cygwin/X - download the installer, make sure the xinit package is selected in the things ( Read more... )

Code clarity results in performance gains.

Code "optimizations" result in bugs.

Knuth was right.

The upcoming C++ Standard is pretty exciting! Especially lambdas and initializer lists. What's *really* interesting is that they're not adopting a lot of the C99 standard, willingly breaking compatibility in a fairly big way.

Joel Spolsky, in a post on how to be a program manager writes:Writing a functional specification is at the very heart of agile development, because it lets you iterate rapidly over many possible designs before you write code. Compared to code, a written spec is trivial to change. The very act of writing a specification forces you to think through ( Read more... )

Dr. Dobbs says:
Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 30932992) (tried to allocate 84 bytes) in /home/dobbscod/public_html/includes/database.php on line 502

No project has EVER failed for lack of a coding standard! Not one ever! Coding standards are what you do instead of something. They do nothing to resolve the problems with the structure of the code, but they allow incompetent programmers to feel as though they are successful and have written good code because they've "followed the standard". I' ( Read more... )

So you know how global variables are evil and should be never used? Yeah, well I've discovered something that's maybe worse, and I call them semi-global variables. They occur in nasty languages that allow nested functions, like Pascal. In the nasty language, a nested function has visibility to all of the variables and arguments of it's containing ( Read more... )

Today's xkcd makes a good case for why I guess I need a Kindle:

( Read more... )

When you dereference a dangling pointer you'll get a segmentation fault (or in Windows an "access violation") which causes a core dump.

you've ever tried to learn a language by reading the BNF.