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Showing posts from August, 2007

Compiler Bug, or Not?

I'm a firmware engineer. We use C++ for our firmware. C++ has been disparaged by some great programmers, but they are also the ones who talk about how great Ruby and JavaScript are. Try writing real-time firmware with those! But I digress. Yesterday I had an interesting experience with a bug that took me far to long to find (the fix was easy). Let me see if I can explain this well enough to get some helpful feedback from the C++ geniuses that I know are lurking out there. I added a new class to our firmware a couple days ago, and had it instantiated inside another class. The two classes can be simplified to look something like this: class Bar { public: Bar(); void initialize(); private: int x; }; class Foo { public: Foo(); void start(); private: Bar * bar; }; Not exactly like that, but close. Firmware isn't very complicated, right? So anyway, here are the implementations for each, roughly: Foo::Foo() { Bar * bar = new Bar();

Django Powered Sites

I guess I'm a little late finding out about this, but I'm excited I found my Django powered family website in the mosaic . C-11.

F-Spot Hurts My Eyes

This is just a public complaint, because I'm too lazy to go file a bug report or something. I use F-Spot for managing my photos on my Ubuntu desktop. It's kind of cool and mostly does what I would expect it to. One thing that really bothers me though is how, when you are flipping through pictures, it shows each one blurry first, and then it come into focus. I suppose this is done for some kind of effect, because I've never seen any other photo software do this ( gthumb and eog , to name a couple close competitors), but it drives me insane. I have bad eyes and have worn glasses since I was about 6 years old. Every time I flip to a new picture they strain to focus on it until it fully comes into focus on its own. If there is any way to make this stop, I'd love to hear about it. And since I'm complaining about F-spot, I'll mention one other major beef I have with it (I've got a bad cold and am grumpy, forgive me). When you import photos, you choose

Too Many Gadgets

Packing for a family trip, we brought: A cell phone, plus charger A portable dvd player, plus charger A digital camera, plus charger An mp3 player, plus charger A GPS, plus charger A laptop, plus charger As I plugged them all in to charge the night before, and then filled an entire backpack with them the next the morning, an iPhone started to look really attractive. I think when they get GPS on that thing it's going to be very hard to resist.