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January 2009
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Jeff is Wrong and don't listen to him
Entropy Overload
– I rarely (I hope) post specific corrections to misleading information out there on the web, not least because there's so much of it and it's usually a futile effort, but Jeff Atwood's latest post really rubbed me up the wrong way. In his post, Jeff writes some unidiomatic C and bewails its ...
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Implementing user-defined copy-on-write data structures in Delphi
Entropy Overload
– There was some discussion about user-defined class operators in the Delphi non-technical forum. Some folks seem to be asking for operators for heap-allocated classes, but in the absence of either GC or reference counting, these are problematic. I suggested that records combined with interfaces can ...
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Semantics, Formats and Markets
Entropy Overload
– I was reading Dare's response to Bill's post on format proliferation and RDF. Bill hopes that more folks will understand RDF and seems to see it somewhat as a silver bullet for the problem, while Dare is more pessimistic. The way I see it, there are distinctly two issues here. The first is the ...
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iPod Touch, iTunes, and unwanted processes
Entropy Overload
– I recently got a second-generation iPod Touch. I don't make enough phone calls to make a phone contract worthwhile, much less an iPhone contract with O2 in the UK; and O2's PAYG (pay as you go) appears to charge GBP 7.50 per roaming MB, while I pay EUR 1 for first 50 MB with my Vodafone Ireland ...
November 2008
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Somewhat more efficient smart pointers
Entropy Overload
– There was a little to and fro in the comments on yesterday's post on more fluent smart pointers. It wasn't my intention to create the ultimate in performance for the smart pointer, so I didn't pay much attention to it; I focused mainly on getting an effect from composing a number of simple reusable ...
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Reference-counted pointers, revisited
Entropy Overload
– Some time ago, I blogged about writing smart pointers (i.e. reference-counted auto-destruction) in Delphi. While having dinner with some of the speakers at the EKON 12 conference I attended last week, a more fluent interface for using smart pointers in Delphi occurred to me. I'm using the same ...
October 2008
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Types: Values versus Locations
Entropy Overload
– Minor thought I had this morning: I was doing some prep work for the conference I'm speaking at next week, and I noticed I was being perhaps overly pedantic about the terminology of types in a way that only matters for imperative languages. I habitually make explicit the distinction between values ...
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WASD's little known alternative, QWAS
Entropy Overload
– I was reading a review of a new Microsoft gaming keyboard today and I noticed that it has extra highlighting for the traditional WASD keyboard layout most commonly used by first-person shooters (FPSs). This interests me because I don't use WASD; I use a variant that I have almost never seen anyone ...
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The Search for Differentiation and Build vs Buy/Adopt/Coopt
Entropy Overload
– There's been some chatter in the development blogosphere recently about that old chestnut, the build vs buy decision; but in these days of open source development, there are more alternatives to build: adoption and cooption (private forking / customized modules etc.). Jeff Atwood wrote an article ...
September 2008
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Anonymous methods as an alternative to 'out' parameters
Entropy Overload
– Out parameters are a useful language feature for multiple results, particularly when the language in question doesn't have tuples as a first-class feature. Even though Java omitted pass-by-reference (meaning both var and out in Delphi parlance), C# did not follow its lead and includes both ...
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Google Developer Day 2008, London
Entropy Overload
– I was at Google Developer Day here in London yesterday. Most of it was pretty light on technical details, but there was some good info on V8, Google's new JavaScript engine which is used in Google Chrome. The specific sessions I went to were Intro to Android, Intro to Android SDK, Google Data API ...
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Exogenous Exceptions (oh and another Vista rant :)
Entropy Overload
– Eric Lippert has just posted an entry about "vexing exceptions", talking about the various buckets he classifies exceptions into and different approaches for handling them: Vexing exceptions are the result of unfortunate design decisions. Vexing exceptions are thrown in a completely non- ...
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Vista LanmanServer falling apart on you?
Entropy Overload
– I've been having a lot of trouble over the past day or so with my Vista machine. Since I can't tolerate it long as a main desktop, it's primarily acting as a file and print server. Over the past day, however, the Vista network sharing service, LanmanServer, has been falling over on me. All attempts ...
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Smart pointers in Delphi
Entropy Overload
– Strongly-typed smart pointers are now possible in Delphi, leveraging the work on generics. Here's a simple smart pointer type: TSmartPointer<T: class> = record strict private FValue: T; FLifetime: IInterface; public constructor Create(const AValue: T); overload; class ...
August 2008
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Anonymous methods in testing / profiling situations
Entropy Overload
– One situation in which anonymous methods are particularly useful is for ad-hoc profiling and testing scenarios. For both profiling and testing, it is code itself that one wants to work with. I.e. the question you are trying to answer is "test this code", or "time this code". Using code as a ...
