October 2005
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Once again I've been too busy to comment on these during the week
A collection of blog posts that I flagged for follow up this week. Aaron Margosis has a blog which explains why you shouldn’t run as an Admin user on Windows systems and how to work around the problems that you might face when you … -
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Asserts are evil, except when you have no other choice
Noel Llopis over on “Games from Within” has written a nice rebuttal to my Asserts are evil post and the follow up. I think it’s probably about time to wrap this up ;) So, here’s what I’ve learned… … -
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Jeff Darcy on Linus on specifications
Jeff Darcy over at “Canned Platypus” has written a nice piece on specifications and how Linus has got it wrong. Any post that contains the phrase: "… who wouldn’t know good code if it got into a robot and … -
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Serenity
Just back from seeing Serenity. It doesn’t disappoint. We got into Firefly whilst on our ski trip to Megève last season and were really hooked. The film continues the story from the series, answers some of the questions left hanging … -
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MT-Blacklist
It seems that Jay Allen has shutdown both MT-Blacklist and the ‘master blacklist’ due to bandwidth problems caused by either a denial of service attack or inconsiderate developers. Jay hosted a regularly updated file of regular … -
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Walking the call stack
Ned Batchelder has written about the code he uses to get a call stack out of a windows program (thanks for the link Barry). I’ve added a snippet of the code I use as a comment to his post. Note: the deadlock detector mentioned in this … -
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More on locking
Jeff Darcy over at “Canned Platypus” writes about “How to add locking to a program”. He laments the lack of a reasonably priced deadlock detection tool. I assume, from his backgrond, that he’s interested in an … -
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Back in time
I find it quite interesting to have so much information about my past available on the web. I often use my own blog like a database that I can search for past solutions to problems, or for locating some text on my feelings on a subject that … -
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Throwing the baby out with the bathwater
Richard Hale Shaw writes on and his conclusion is “it’s too confusing” and “I’d suggest not even using using statements”. I think that position is a little harsh, but I think that the main problem is that … -
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Quote of the week
“Desire to know why, and how, curiosity; such as is in no living creature but man: so that man is distinguished, not only by his reason, but also by this singular passion from other animals; in whom the appetite of food, and other … -
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I don't think I've ever been disagreed with in Japanese before
The discussion on Assert goes on, this time in Japanese… Google’s language tools lead me to believe that they’re disagreeing with me. They seem to be pretty shocked that I’d take this stance and appear happier when … -
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Dependency Injection
Jeremy D. Miller writes about The Dependency Injection Pattern; or what I’ve tended to call “Parameterise from above”. He covers the various ways you can inject a dependency into a class rather than having the knowledge of … -
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Walking Managed Stacks with the Profiling API in v2.0 of the CLR
It seems to be stack walking week; what with Ned’s posting earlier about walking an unmanaged stack and now this excellent piece by David Broman on doing the same in with managed code. -
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Printf debugging when you don't have a console
There’s a nice story over on “Bug Babble” about debugging a problem with a robot by using various sounds coming out of a speaker to determine where in the code the problem occurred: “Now the robot sounded like a … -
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Some people shouldn't be dungeon master
This made me smile. From “Irregular Web Comic”, via Raincannon. -
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Reprints - OLEDB; no pain, no gain
I’ve just finished posting several OLE DB provider articles from back in 1999 and 2000 when the favourite method of data access that Microsoft recommended was OLE DB. This was relatively easy to use as a data consumer, especially from … -
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Classic hits
Jacob Nielsen has a list of Top Ten Blog Design Mistakes. Number 5 is “Classic hits are buried” where he suggests that it is useful for readers if you list your most ‘important’ entries prominently as well as … -
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Unit testing and accessing external systems
There’s a lot of talk about how unit tests shouldn’t touch the network or the file system or databases whilst they’re running. Michael Feathers even has a set of unit test “rules” (A Set of Unit Testing Rules) … -
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Charles Petzold on coding
Charles Petzold recently delivered a talk at the NYC .Net Developer’s Group and he’s made it available online here “Does Visual Studio Rot The Mind?”. It’s an interesting read, especially if you actually … -
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LNK2005: _iswdigit already defined in ...
I’m in the process of preparing a release for a client. I’ve done the work, the tests pass, the stress test runs with flying colours and so I’ve tagged the source and I’m in the middle of the final build and test … -
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If you enjoyed the Petzold thing earlier...
This may also be your kinda thing. Ellen Ullman’s 1998 two part series “The Dumbing-Down of Programming” from Salon archives. Rebelling against Microsoft, “My Computer” and easy-to-use Wizards, an engineer … -
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Old friends
I guess it’s a combination of wine, Pink Floyd and the fact that this week the world wants to remind me that I’m older than I feel. Thoughts drift back to the past. Times past and friends forgotten. A long time ago, in a galaxy … -
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Evil macros in April 2005 Platform SDK headers
I’m upgrading one of my build machines to use the April 2005 edition of the Platform SDK to investigate the implications of this posting over at eggheadcafe.com which states that since Visual Studio 6 ceased to be supported as of the … -
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Handling lots of socket connections
I’m doing some research for a potential client. They need a TCP/IP server that handles ’lots’ of concurrent connections. Their own in-house server code currently fails at 4-6000 connections and I’m putting together a … -
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Note to self
This CodeProject entry is SO full of errors and poor practice that I must find the time to leave a comment on it… [Updated: 29th October] Done. Comment is here. -
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Assume makes an ass out of u and me
But mostly me. ;) During yesterday’s investigations into handling lots (30,000+) of socket connections to a server built with The Server Framework I took a few things for granted. I should have been a bit more thorough rather than … -
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The 64000 connection question
I’ve been spending some time pushing the limits of The Server Framework, my IO Completion Port based socket server framework, to see how many connections my servers can handle and what happens when system resources run out. Earlier …
