March 2004
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Most interesting present
My birthday lasted all week, which was good. I celebrated on the day at Strada in upper street, on Friday at the Almeida and on Saturday at Curry Special. Thanks for all the wonderful presents. Right now the most “interesting” … -
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We'll be right back, after this word...
Surprisingly enough the Bluetooth server “technology preview” has generated quite a bit of interest from potential clients, which is nice. In a similar spirit, I’m making the compiled version of our server that uses the … -
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POPing back
Way back in mid November, before we dumped our building’s managing agent for being worse than useless and possibly stealing from us, I was working on some POP3 code. I had some down time today so I decided to drop back into it and see … -
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Thought for the day
If you don’t write the code are you doomed to forever be thinking that the abstraction is all in the wrong place? Another day, another dollar. Starting with a new client, well starting back with an old client, and doing that … -
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These are not the containers you're looking for
STL containers are great. Rather than have to worry about writing doubly linked lists, efficient maps, and other such data structures you just grab one from the STL and you’re away. Unfortunately the STL containers have quite a large … -
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Craig on TDD
Craig Andera talks about TDD. I couldn’t have said it better myself. -
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Adding layers without adding value
I’m a great fan of wrapping stuff up with thin layers that make the wrapped code easier to use in a given circumstance, or to provide a more appropriate interface. Obviously there are other reasons to wrap APIs but I’m … -
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Cypher
I’m currently working with a corporate client. The plan is that I’ll help them refactor a key component in their system and make it more robust and increase performance. Right now they’re in the middle of a release and are … -
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Meanwhile, back with the tests
I’ve seen a lot of blog postings recently that pour scorn on the ideas behind TDD. Ah well, if you don’t like it, don’t do it. I’m more than happy if our competitors decide that TDD isn’t for them. In fact, … -
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OpenSSL test server certs expired
The test certificates that shipped along with the OpenSSL server demo that I posted here have expired. I’ll post some new ones shortly. -
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Const correctness
Interesting thread over on Joel today about using const, or not. The original poster asked how many people bothered to mark function parameters that they don’t modify as const and whether there was any performance or readability … -
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Code review
I’m reviewing a large body of code for a client at present. It’s a general review of the design, coding style, code correctness and testability of a project. I started off by making notes on some of the general design changes … -
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Saas Fee in September
Those of you who are interested in the Warren Smith Saas Fee ski training sessions you might like to take a look at Warren’s latest DVD, Warren Smith Ski Academy Lesson 2. The first two sections, carving and steeps, were filmed during … -
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True, even if beauty is in the eye of the beholder
“I’ll bet you that from ten feet away I can tell if a program is bad. I might not guarantee that it is good, but if it looks bad from ten feet, I can guarantee you that it wasn’t written with care. And if it wasn’t … -
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Jimmy on TDD
I agree 100% with this piece from Jimmy Nilsson’s blog. -
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Async Pop
A while back I finally started on the async version of the POP3 client. It ended up as a state machine and seemed to work well. The next step was to write an async version of the mail collector that I used to pull all mail from a mailbox on … -
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Testing synchronous communications
Today I’m doing some work for a client that involves writing some blocking sockets code to talk to one of our servers. Blocking mode fits well with the architecture of the client application they use; we’re moving the app from … -
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Bizarre Googling
As Gavin pointed out in a comment yesterday, if you type “cure for rsi” into Google right now my hair-brained babblings about how drinking lots of water helps is top of the pile… If only I could do that with technical …
