Category: Geekery

I’ve always been a book learner. I’ve learned just about everything I know about computers from books, sometimes from books bought in order to learn something I said I knew to be read in between the time I said I knew it and the time I’ve started the job where I was supposed to know it. Hell, even when I was in school I used to read in class instead of paying attention to the professors. But lately, between my internet addiction and all the other distractions in life, I just don’t seem to be able to get through text books the way I used to. Glancing over at my book shelf, I can see books on Ruby on Rails and Ajax that I intended to read once and become and instant expert on, just like I always used to, but which I ended up reading two or three chapters, wandering away, and never coming back. And that’s not to mention the growing pile of unread or barely skimmed magazines that has to be culled every few months for fear of them taking over the house.
Continue reading “The change of life”

I started doing C++ back just before cfront 2.0 just came out. For those of you not paying attention, cfront was a program that turned C++ code into C code, and then fed that into the C compiler. There wasn’t any such thing as native C++ compiler, or C++-aware debuggers. It was “fun”, especially when you got a core dump and you had to read a symbol like “foo_vt0_bar_xyzzy” and figure out that this meant that it had something to do with a virtual method in foo called something like bar. And of course, the line numbers in the backtrace were no help at all because the generated code bore little resemblance to what you’d written. Cfront 2.0 was when multiple inheritance was first introduced into C++, and I think it was around 1989 or so. I know I went to Usenix in Baltimore a few months later to take a class in C++ from Stanley Lippman, who’d written a book whose title he’d insisted on pronouncing as if the word “primer” was derived from “prim” rather than “prime”.
Continue reading “For the first time since learning Java, I wish I was doing C++”

Well, not really mine. The division I work at just won their 9th Oscar, and to celebrate they sent it around to the division offices so everybody could get their picture taken with it. In spite of the fact that I had nothing to do with it, I sat down at the table. Of course, I wasn’t allowed to actually touch it or anything – the photographer and her assistants handled it with rubber gloves on so it wouldn’t need re-polishing.

Only half a year or so late, I finally upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.3. And it seems to have worked “out of the box” with no surprises and everything working. That’s my favourite type of upgrade.