No Soul to the Company Store
In February I went up to Washington for a visit to Microsoft, to get some partner training about Office 2007. Among the typical freebies I got for attending (laptop bag, USB hub, CD case, etc.) was a pass to the Microsoft company store. I was pretty stoked as I started …
Work Plan Editor Release
A few years ago I got really frustrated trying to maintain a schedule for my current development assignment. I personally think that having a schedule, or work plan, is a very good thing. But it was too painful to maintain one, so I started writing a tool that would help …
Object-Oriented vs. Database-Oriented
Having worked for Folio and NextPage, companies that have specialized in full-text indexing using custom search engines, I have an admitted knowledge liability with regard to relational databases. It never really made sense to have a relational database and our own search database coexisting in an application. But it never …
Design by Contract: Is It Worth It Without Language Support?
This is a continuation of thoughts after reading Design by Contract by Example by Richard Mitchell and Jim McKim. This time I want to write a little about design by contract without direct language support. What do you give up without language support, and is it still worth it to …
Ten Lessons Learned Assembling a PC
I spent some of my Christmas vacation upgrading the hardware on my PC. I've been suspicious that there was something wrong with my old motherboard, so I decided to get a new one. And when you're getting a new motherboard, you might as well get a new CPU and new …
ByChance - An experiment with randomness
ByChance.exe
Version 1.0.0.28867
21 Sep 2005
84 KB
ByChance depends on the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1, which can be obtained through Windows Update.
ByChance is an experiment brought about after considering the effect of randomness in biological evolution. For more background, please see …
By Chance - Can Order Come Out of Randomness?
A few years ago I was reading some books about biological evolution. At some point, probably reading something by Richard Dawkins, I was thinking about randomness and its ability to produce apparently non-random things. All you need is a little pressure that selects one random thing over another. So I …
Design by Contract: An Alternative to Testing for Code Quality
I recently finished reading Design by Contract by Example by Richard Mitchell and Jim McKim. The book, as its title suggests, gives advice about writing good contracts through a set of principles applied in various examples. In addition to wanting to learn more about design by contract generally, I came …
Dell Axim X50v in a Palm User's Hands
It seems like Microsoft's typical entry into a market goes something like this. It sees an interesting market built up by someone else, and releases a product in that space. The product is crap compared to the existing market leader. Microsoft revs the product a few times until it is …
Packing and Alignment
I've made some effort to understand the differences between the Struct
Member Alignment compiler option /Zp, #pragma pack and
__declspec(align()) with Microsoft Visual C++ in light of an odd bug
that ultimately was caused by inconsistent packing options between
compilation units.
/Zp and #pragma pack are equivalent, but /Zp …