General

London MMO Meetup - Christof Wegmann from Exit Games and Ben Hollis from King

I dragged myself into London last night for the London MMO Meetup. I had some clients that I wanted to chat to who were going and the programme looked good. This was the first “meetup” that I’d been to, it was good and the format worked well. We were hosted by King at their London office on Wardour Street. The office was great, the presentation space was good and they provided a nice spread of food and drink.

Living with Gimpel Lint is made so much easier with Visual Lint

I’ve been a big fan of Gimpel Lint for years. It’s a great static analysis tool for C++ and it can locate all kinds of issues or potential issues in the code. My problem with it has always been that it’s a bit of a pig to configure and run, more so if you’re used to working inside an IDE all the time. Several years back I had some custom Visual Studio menu items that I’d crufted up that ran Gimpel Lint on a file or a project and some more cruft that converted the output to something clickable in the IDE’s output pane.

Visual Studio 2013 Preview - isprint() incorrectly classifies ' ' as printable for 'C' locale.

It seems that `isprint() is broken. The following program demonstrates the problem. In VS20013 it prints “test failed” in all previous versions of visual studio it prints “test passed”. From this reference: http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/string/byte/isprint it seems that VS2013 is broken. I’ve opened a Microsoft Connect issue for this. #include <ctype.h> #include <iostream> int main() { int c = 9; if (isprint(c)) { std::cout << "test failed" << std::endl; } else { std::cout << "test passed" << std::endl; } return 1; }

Comments disabled for a while

Due to masses of attempted comment spam which was causing my hosting provider’s server some problems I’ve disabled comments for a while. Email me if you have something you’d like added and I’ll sort it out for you. Update - 13/5/13 - comments enabled again…

10 years of blogging...

On the 3rd of May 2003 I posted the first entry on this blog. I then proceeded to “back fill” the blog with various things that had either been posted before in other places or had been laying around waiting for me to have somewhere to put them. This is why although the blog began in 2003 the archives go back to 1992. Things have changed quite a lot since then, both in terms of blogging and my life.

Welcome to the new Rambling Comments

I’ve just finished upgrading the blog from Movable Type 2.64 to Movable Type 5.0.x. The main reason behind actually getting around to doing this (the ‘update blog’s MT version’ “todo item” has been on my list for several years!) is so that I can integrate Rambling Comments with my other technical blogs. At present it’s just The Server Framework blog, but I have two more micro blog sites due in 2011 for products that I’m working on and I wanted to be able to include the entries from these new blogs into the main Rambling Comments feed.

ServerFramework.com

I’ve put together a new website for my super scalable, high performance, I/O Completion Port based server framework. This has all of the information that you need to decide if you can use The Free Framework or if you’d prefer to license The Server Framework. There’s also a new server example, WASP, which is a pluggable server platform that is available in compiled form and is free for non-commercial use. Over the next few months WASP will evolve to support most of the key features of the various options that are available with The Server Framework such as SSL, Managed hosting, UDP and TCP, etc.

DevPartner Studio 10

My previous rant about DevPartner Studio (and especially the BoundsChecker portion of it) resulted in several emails from guys on the development team and a call from product owner at MicroFocus. They pointed me towards the latest ‘web sync’ (service pack) which was released shortly after my rant, explained how the issues I’d noticed had made it through testing and why they existed and commiserated with me over the state of support.

DevPartner Studio 9.0 and VS2008

It seems that there’s a ‘known issue’ with DevPartner studio’s instrumentation and VS2008. Apparently the compiler architecture changed somewhat between VS2005 and VS2008 and sometimes the instrumentation is incorrect which is the cause of my ‘strange crashes’ with DevPartner 9.0. There’s no patch available at this time…

Comments are off for a while

I’m in the process of moving the blog from one host to another and until I get all of the perl configuration working so that the various comment spam protection methods are working properly I’m turning off comments. Email me if you have a comment to add.