In C++, the static keyword has a lot of meanings. Let’s go over all of them: Meaning 1: Private Linkage This one comes from C, and it lets you mark a variable as “file private”. Example: static int i = 42; void doSomething() { cout << i; } In this example, static tells the compiler […]

Communication is everything in software development. Unless you work on a team of one, it’s important that your code communicates easily to your team members. Even if you do work on a team of one, it’s important to communicate to your future self. Yeah, everyone has to read their own code once in a while, […]

If there’s one thing you can’t argue about Test Driven Development, it’s that it creates more code than software written without it. Not just unit test code, either. To make code testable, developers often introduce extra layers of abstraction to make their code accessible, in isolation, from within their unit test code. This can be […]

Sometimes I can’t help myself. This week, I read a blog post asking what was wrong with a dialog. I found plenty of stuff wrong, so I decided to write a response and create a replacement dialog. This is not intended as an attack on the dialog author. I hope it’s not received that way. […]

I have various files that download to my computer automatically. They arrive at different times of the day or night. When they do, I like to transfer them to a network drive on another computer automatically. But there’s a wrinkle. When the files auto-download to my computer, they go into one folder automatically, but when […]

On US tax day 2010, OpenWrt’s “qt4” feed got support for MySQL and SQLite. And there was much rejoicing among Qt developers. A big thanks to Mirko Vogt for porting the build system to OpenWrt and letting me help out with the SQL stuff.

For a while, I haven’t been able to get scp to work between Linux and Mac OS X. This only happened when I used the scp command on my Linux box, with Mac OS X acting as the ssh server. Here’s the symptom: On Linux: $ scp user@192.168.1.5:~/Documents/Some/File.txt /tmp/. Password: $ It disconnected me after […]

After a stress-free build, the ParkZone Habu gave me two stress-free maiden flights. I’ll let the video do all the talking:

Today’s reminder comes from the “magic number” department, where we remind you to never hard-code a magic number in your software. For example, the value for ETIMEDOUT on Linux can vary depending on your C library. glibc, for example, defines it as 110, but uClibc defines it as 145. This tends to matter when you […]

M&Ms are yummy. At work we have ginormous bags of M&Ms to snack on. One day I reached into the bag and pulled out a handful (about 8 M&Ms). I happily munched until there were 4 left. Lo and behold! The remaining 4 were all blue. “What are the odds,” I asked myself. So I […]