I recently came across the new Celeste code for the Hugin panorama software.
I recently had the need to be able to query the WMI via WQL (which are very fascinating and helpful technologies, actually) from C++. WQL essentially provides an SQL interface for querying system properties of a running computer.
There are plenty of opinions out there about how to write great code ranging from styles and techniques to code formatting and programming languages. Inevitably when discussing great code someone will say, “But what if you need code right now, and you are willing to sacrifice quality in order to get work done faster?”
OS News announced yesterday that Google Chrome 2.0 Beta was just released. I’ve been searching for the perfect browser for my new Acer Aspire One
The boost::lexical_cast<> utility is a handy way of converting objects to and from strings, providing a mechanism that many scripting languages have built in. lexical_cast works with any C++ type that has ostream and istream operators defined for it, that is, any object that cout << object; or cin >> object; would work with. This boost facility also does intelligent things such as throwing a bad_cast exception if the operation causes an error flag on the stream to be set. I use boost::lexical_cast<> throughout my code at work for things like serialization of objects for human readable communications. It is also sprinkled liberally throughout my code for handling things like quick debug logging:
In 1984 the Communications of the ACM published an article, Reflections on Trusting Trust. Which is an amazing, and disturbing read about software trust. The article begins with the exercise, “create a program which can replicate itself.” This leads deftly to the idea of modifying a compiler such that every time code is compiled it adds a security vulnerability. The author points out that this kind of problem in a compiler could and would be found rather quickly. However, it takes a compiler to compile a new compiler.
A few weeks back, I posited the question, “What is the best way to format a comma delimited list?” After seeing all of the succinct ways to accomplish this in other languages, I got a little jealous and decided to write this C++ algorithm which acts about the same. I feel like there must be a c++ standard library way of doing this that I’m some how overlooking.
Chapter 4 of Real World Haskell
Say you have a list, array, vector, storage format doesn’t matter:
Sometimes, in the course of C++ template based programming it might be desirable to have a constructor that is templated, like the following contrived exampled: