Monday, March 8th, 2010
C++ is big - it has been said that any given programmer only ever uses about 40% of the language's features. The trouble is that it is a different 40% for each person. Exceptions are a great example of this, some people swear by them while many coding standards specifically ...
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Saturday, February 13th, 2010
I have been doing some iPhone development lately. Nothing too amazing, just some test apps to get a feel for the system. Now, some people will tell you that Cocoa Touch is an API sent from God and frankly it is pretty good (especially given what passes for UI on ...
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Sunday, December 6th, 2009
In C++ if you have a variable that you say is of type "Person" (for instance), you can be fairly certain (more or less) that it always actually contains a Person (or perhaps a subclass of Person. If you have a container of Persons, then you know (more or less) ...
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Saturday, November 28th, 2009
I don't usually do a lot of Python programming, but I always enjoy it when the opportunity arises. Python is in no way a "clean" language, it has all sorts of warts and limitations that mean that it tends to not get used for big projects. Despite this (or maybe ...
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Thursday, May 28th, 2009
Back in the day there was no standard way to publish video on the web. You could put any kind of video file you wanted on the server, but there was no guarantee that your readers would have the correct plugin required to view it. Everyone had to have a ...
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Sunday, March 15th, 2009
The standard C++ iostreams library is very good (well, some would say sort-of good) at reading and writing a file's contents, but it does so in such a way as to completely ignore file names. I am sure there was a good reason for this omission, but whatever it was ...
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Sunday, February 15th, 2009
A former colleage of mine (Hi Nigel!) frequently wore the greatest geek tee-shirt I have ever seen to work. Ineptly reproduced here, it summarizes the realities of software development - when deciding what to implement technical considerations are often overruled by more prosaic influences.
Take this comment by another old colleage. ...
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Monday, February 9th, 2009
Living on a spherical planet can sometimes be a real pain in the neck. It makes what should be a simple concept, Time, inordinately complex. Timezones, daylight savings, leap years (and worse: leap seconds) all conspire to destroy any simple abstraction. So boost provides a complex one.
First up is the ...
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Monday, January 19th, 2009
One of the many, many legitimate criticisms that could be leveled at C++ is that string handling is abysmal. Sure std::string can hold some chars for you, but there is a distinct lack of utility functions to actually do anything with those characters. Enter the Boost String Algorithm library, or ...
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Sunday, January 18th, 2009
We are still only in the low lands of boost territory but already we are coming across useful discoveries. Today's stop is boost::assign, one of those clever little pieces of code that makes life easier for everyone. Often you just want to load up a container with some small amount ...
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Tuesday, January 13th, 2009
Although I like to think of myself of a jack-of-all-programming-trades, I must admit that I am mainly a C++ man. I have dabbled in the seductive dark side of Java and C#, but still prefer the mad poetry that C++ code can generate. A few years ago, C++ was showing ...
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Saturday, August 25th, 2007
A follow up to the previous entry which you can read here: My Thoughts on Objective-C
Related posts:The C++ Boost Libraries Part 5 – boost::filesystem The standard C++ iostreams library is very good (well, some...Using Exceptions in C++ C++ is big – it has been said that any...The HTML5 Video Tag’s ...
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Tuesday, August 21st, 2007
Recently I have been attempting a little light MacOSX programming, to see if the grass really is greener over the fence. This means learning Objective-C, here are some random notes I made along the way (warning: much esoteric geekery ahead)
UPDATE: I have had some more thoughts, read them here.
Related posts:The ...
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