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Make_shared, almost a silver bullet
Herb Sutter just published a new Guru of the Week in which he claims one should always use make_shared when created shared pointers. This is very good advice (as one can expect from Herb) but I can’t...
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Picking sides
Say you walk into a conference room. Where do you sit? It’s as Multivac said: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER. Well, here’s some more data, you’re expected to hook up to the projector during...
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A const BSTR isn’t
If you’ve programmed any COM you’ve come across the ubiquitous BSTR string type. You may have even been tempted to have a read-only BSTR and used a const BSTR. Unfortunately this is not to be. If we...
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When babies hiccough
A few months ago I edited my about page, nothing major I just added two new characters + and 1. This small edit has indirectly taken up a lot of my time but it also gave me some new material. To cut a...
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Who touched my files?
When the three bears got back to their lodge they were eager to find out who touched all their stuff. We were recently in a similar position, our application was too slow, we suspected that we were...
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Global BSTRs
Working with COM from C++ is pretty natural, after all COM’s interfaces are binary compatible with C++ virtual tables. However there are some places in which the fact that COM was designed to work with...
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Use of dynamic causes trust issues between developer and compiler according...
I do most of my work in C++ and have a bit of a abusive relationship with my compiler. It yells long error messages at me at the slightest provocation and I do my best to placate it. In return I gain...
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Life the Blogosphere and Everything
Today is the third anniversary of my first blog post. I must admit I’m a bit surprised that I managed to last so long. Not letting the lack of anything to say get in my way was a big help (case in...
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A Protocol for Communication with Aliens
A few months ago some of my cow-orkers tried to send a distress signal to the outside world: Pac-Man rendered with Post-it notes Before long we got a reply from the building across the street: Space...
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Time capsule for 2112
On 12/12/1912 Abraham Alfons Lanzkron sent his 9 year old son Lazarus a postcard. Front of Postkarte Back of Postkarte One hundred years later, Lazarus’s son Abraham (AKA Romy) Lanzkron emailed the...
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The Carpet Rule
I spent my professional life working in only two places, in both of these companies a Carpet Rule was available to protect people’s coffee breaks. Simply put the carpet rule states that: Work may be...
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Extending the family metaphor
The metaphor of family is everywhere in programming. We have parent and child processes, HTML has parent nodes whose child nodes are all siblings. The fact that in all these cases there is only one...
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Bob the Giant Slayer
One of the nice things about living in Israel is that you get to see many of the places mentioned in the bible. When taking youth movements on hikes it’s customary to say stuff like “On this rock Jacob...
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Malkovich? Malkovich Malkovich!
If you ever logged logged in to a windows computer that uses the Japanese display language you probably saw that the path separator is not the common backslash (\) but the Yen symbol (¥). Well at least...
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Blogging for Pleasure and Profit
The blog you’re currently reading is written as a hobby with no financial gain in mind. Happily my employer sometimes encourages me to take some time off my usual work and write a blog post (which...
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Regexs in UFT
Last month I talked about a blog post I wrote for work. I didn’t mention that there was some stuff that was dropped during editing. Some of the discarded material was salvaged and expanded into a new...
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Press Cancel to cancel (or Cancelable Asserts)
Back when I developed on Unix asserts where simple, if an assert fired the application would abort with a nice core dump which could be then debugged at leisure. When I moved to Windows development one...
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For better mileage…
In the early nineties I had a hobby, I would buy blank T-shirts and paint on them. I never had any art training (or talent) but since it was my work I was pretty fond of these shirts. At first they...
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Out of memory, out of luck?
I was recently implementing a new feature that takes a user-supplied file, parses it and adds some slithy toves to the active manxome[1]. Now as I’m sure everyone knows toves consume a lot of memory...
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Punishments are a Poor Parenting Practice
They say that you shouldn’t threaten children with punishments, it’s more empowering for children to have the consequences of their actions explained to them. Say for example that you put your child’s...
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