February 2009 Blog Posts

Lately for work I have been responsible for developing a .NET layer to read from and write to an existing application's binary data files.  The task has proven tedious, but not necessarily boring, as I've discovered some invaluable tools and development principles from this. First off, the HxD hex editor, and, more importantly, comparison tool is simply perfect for the job. Many minute differences in my binary output were discovered with this tool.  By using the comparison feature: I could determine the first instance of a difference in output and,...

So little Liam just had his first birthday last Thursday.  Among the plethora of toys dumped on him is an incredibly annoying, er, wonderful alphabet speaking caterpillar: There's a small yellow bow switch just below the head with three settings, plus off (dear God): letter pronouncing, alternate letter pronouncing, and color word.  These obviously coincide with the feet, so if you press the A foot, the caterpillar will speak "A" on the letter pronunciation, "ah" on the alternate pronunciation, and "red" on the color one. I had the setting on alternate pronunciation,...

So, I am lazy, as I believe most programmers are.  I follow Bill Cosby's sage advice to work hard to keep from working. At work I'd "inherited" a code-complete medium-sized application in C++ that requires somewhat extensive feature enhancements / changes (due to the customer, of course). I've been noticing that it seems much easier to write very foreign looking code in C / C++ than it is in C#, and although this application was obviously brilliantly coded, it is quite foreign indeed, seeming to be more of a C+ application than full-on C or C++. Nevertheless,...