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{ Category Archives } programming

Python 3.0 Released

3.0 is finally out. Go get it.
Say you took all the programming languages I have ever encountered and put them into a table. If you were to assign a column to ease of use, a column to language power, and a third column to the product of the previous two columns, then reverse sort the [...]

Small Basic

Microsoft just released another .NET language: Small Basic, designed to get MS back into the business of teaching programming.
I have to laugh at parts of the release document. For example, the claim that programming languages started simple and easy to learn, and that the high-level concepts of modern languages discourage people from learning to code. [...]

iTunes 7.7 COM bug

I’ve had a little utility for quite some time now that I use mainly to let the iTunes’ current song play through its end, then stop. It’s one feature from Winamp that I couldn’t deal without.
Quite recently, I upgraded to iTunes 7.7. My little utility stopped working. When I finally got around to looking into [...]

Protocol Buffers

Subtitle: The good, the bad, and the… no, wait; this is a Google project.
XML and Java have the same sort of flavor to them: they’re reasonably good and very widely used; they’re the sort of product that design committees everywhere aspire to create. Their flaws only really become visible after something better comes along. In [...]

I made a toy

It’s not very much*, but it represents my first tentative steps towards doing something visual with PyGame.
“But,” you object, “what happened to that C++ project you were working on?”
Basically, I got bored**. I have a fairly high tolerance for doing background research before jumping into a project, but the sheer volume of required reading to [...]

virtual insanity

I’m trying to remain enthusiastic about C++. I’ve been pushing through the books, trying to gain enough fluency to start pushing forward on a real project. Every once in a while I’d run across something weird, like the necessity of explicitly writing a copy constructor and overloading the assignment operator of any non-trivial class, but [...]

fibb.cpp

Expressed here as a tag cloud. The source code itself is nothing special; it’s just an easy way to test my knowledge of C++ as it grows.

c++

I check out of the Basic Combat Skills phase of flight training this Thursday, and have an expected wait of several months before I start training in whichever advanced aircraft I end up with. Naturally, a project was spontaneously created to fill the anticipated upcoming free time. In this case, the project is to learn [...]

Engineered vs. Organic Code

The code I posted this morning is nothing I’d ever show to a prospective employer. It is sparsely commented, convoluted, and nearly impossible to expand. All I actually wrote of it last night was the part to prune down the source tree, so that the best-rated categories weren’t being spammed out by a bunch of [...]

providers of useful information get many bonus points

I’m facing a programming problem I’m not sure quite how to approach.
I need to inspect an arbitrary process running in Windows. I’d call the task introspection, but I have no access to the source of the process I want to inspect. Ideally, there is some sort of powerful framework for this built into Windows itself, [...]