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 I can drop into a report and tweak. When producing code reviews for clients it’s useful to be able to justify your view points (I have a lot of views that need justification ;) ) and, in the interests of reuse, having those views up here means that I can easily reuse them.

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 Linux tool, so my deadlock detection tool wont help him much but it’s good to know that it’s not just me that thinks such a tool would be useful… Jeff links to some expensive static code analysis tools that do deadlock detection.

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 blog post is now available for download from www.lockexplorer.com. I started looking into working with windows call stacks a while ago when I was working on my deadlock detection tool.

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 expressions that powered the MT-Blacklist comment spam blocking add-in for Movable Type 2.x. He also published a changes feed that made it easy for others to update their own black lists using the master feed.

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 at the end of the series and allows all the characters to grow a little. Recommended; it’s so much a better Sci-Fi film than then recent Star Wars stuff…

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 literally bit them …" has to be worth a read, and as Jeff says, there’s a vast difference between a truly good specification and a bad one. Good specs are worth their weight in gold and can be a joy to work from.

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… [Updated: 24th October - there is an interesting discussion still going on over in the comments on Noel’s post…] The reasons that I stated for disliking the use of assert in C++ were as follows:

We’ve been engaged to extend The Server Framework so that it fully supports UDP and to provide example servers for this International VOIP Company.

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 start running as non admin. This table of contents post is a good jumping off point if you’re interested in running as a normal user. Jeff Darcy on designing interfaces.

I’m sure you’re all getting bored on my views on using Assert in modern C++ code by now, I’ll try and make this the last one. Last time, I asked if anyone had what they’d consider to be an example of the use of assert in C++ where the usage was valid given my objections to assert. Mark updated this recent posting on the subject to include a link to Raymond Chen’s blog where Raymond is discussing COM object destruction and uses an assert… Given that everyone knows that Raymond is a seriously good programmer doesn’t his use of assert validate the position of those who disagree with me.