noah's mark » programming

Demoware

noah — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 07:11:39 +0000

I’m not sure if that is a real term or not, but I have a rather specific meaning for it: A completely useless feature added to a product because it makes a good demo. Let me first say this: I reject as false that there is some type of dichotomy between features that look good [...]

Ways in which ‘Thomas’ appears the opposite of ‘smart’ to me.

noah — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 03:51:10 +0000

(original article) (originally written the day after that article came out – I ended up posting snide comments on his blog, which was pretty dumb. I tend to do stupid things when I’m angry, and I’m not sure I did much good by telling the guy off on his own blog. Then again, in my [...]

mixing lifetime paradigms

noah — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 02:31:06 +0000

A coworker and I have been struggling (valiantly, I would say) to solve some rather hairy lifetime-related issues at work this week. A sizeable portion of our current work involves the interop between managed (C#) and native (C++/COM) code, which, well, doesn't work out all that well in sufficiently complicated scenarios.

Not that this is an easy problem to solve, mind you. The problem is one of semantics.

a more holistic measure of performance

noah — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 20:48:45 +0000

</blog hiatus> Without getting too much into details, the most frustrating thing I have to deal with at work is our general development infrastructure, the worst offender being version control. In part and due to the peculiarities of our build environment (and not strictly due to the version control system we use), every one of [...]

freeing memory on exit

noah — Thu, 22 May 2008 07:23:07 +0000

Back when I was a TA, I found that a few people had a very curious misconception. In C++, they thought, if you never deleted an object, that object would never ever get freed until you restarted your computer. Basically, that a memory leak is memory that is lost and gone forever (for all intents [...]

Getting over the hump

noah — Thu, 22 May 2008 05:50:00 +0000

Almost every person I work with has some type of programming project they work on at home. Michael (last I checked) is writing a synthesizer to go along with the midi controller keyboard he now owns, Matthew is writing an application so that he can update his music library’s metadata more easily, and other people [...]

Singularity and the MSR-LA

noah — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 19:30:39 +0000

Slashdot is running an article about how Singularity is now Open Source, and I’m surprised to see that, of all places, Slashdot missed the obvious point. Return to the “sharing is caring” MSR-LA (before it was the MSR-SSLA or something like that): 4. That Microsoft is granted back, a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, and sub-licensable license [...]

how to not ask questions redux

noah — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 20:56:12 +0000

It never ends. Today, somebody sent a question to a linux questions alias about some Microsoft specific compiler extension on Windows and what equivalent exists, if any, in gcc. As always, the very first google search result for the name of the declaration and “gcc” yields the answer. Then again, he probably used Live search, [...]

Eric Meijer invented dumb.

noah — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 19:11:47 +0000

I just saw the funniest thing. I’m watching this talk, by Eric Meijer, about Visual Basic. During the talk, he keeps bringing up examples of where languages “stole” features from VB. The first (and marginally less funny), is when he basically states that modules (i.e. collections of functions) were invented by Visual Basic. That’s right. [...]

C/C++ and sizes of types

noah — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:30:51 +0000

Every so often, I get asked questions along the lines of one of these: Question type #1: I need a type that is exactly n bytes/bits long. How do I get this? Question type #2: On machine x, the size of some type(usually wchar_t) is wrong! How do I fix it? I actually just got [...]