jalf.dk

A Stack­Over­flow sib­ling site ded­i­cated to LaTeX (or TeX in gen­eral) ques­tions has been pro­posed. How­ever, the site won’t be launched unless enough prospec­tive users indi­cate that they’re will­ing to use it.

As a LaTeX user, I’d love to see this take off. Con­tinue read­ing TeXOverflow.com? Sounds good

Dear world.

I grad­u­ated. My the­sis defense went well and I’m no longer a stu­dent. Just thought I’d let you know

So what hap­pens now? No clue, but I sup­pose it involves find­ing a job.

A while ago I wrote a bit about Microsoft’s prac­tice of “dog­food­ing” their soft­ware. That sparked a fair amount of dis­cus­sion on Reddit.

Of course, a few peo­ple assumed I was talk­ing in absolutes, that because the prac­tice of dog­food­ing is not per­fect, it must be evil. That’s a bit of an exag­ger­a­tion. Con­tinue read­ing Dog­food­ing redux

The end is nigh.

On mon­day the 12th of April, I’m going to defend my master’s the­sis. If you’re in the area, and are geeky enough to find it inter­est­ing, feel free to drop by. Con­tinue read­ing The­sis defense!

Just over a month ago, I handed in my Mas­ters The­sis. All that’s left now is an oral defense of it one of the next weeks. So what hap­pens then? I sup­pose I should find a job. A few peo­ple have asked if I am going to do a PhD, but I don’t think so. I think I’ve had enough of acad­e­mia for now. It was fun while it lasted, but I think it’s time to try some­thing dif­fer­ent. Con­tinue read­ing Post-thesis, post-aprils-fools update

Funny how some sub­jects seem to attract catchy titles like flies. A lot of very clever peo­ple have writ­ten vol­umes about “The Sim­ple­ton Pat­tern”, and “Sin­gle­toni­tis” (bah, dead link, let’s use this instead then).

Many peo­ple are in love with the Sin­gle­ton pat­tern. Oth­ers — a small minor­ity, I sus­pect — con­sider it a mis­take, an anti-pattern, or some­thing that was only ever included in the Design Pat­terns book as a life­line to pro­ce­dural pro­gram­mers who couldn’t really fig­ure out this OOP thing. Con­tinue read­ing Sin­gle­tons: Solv­ing prob­lems you didn’t know you never had since 1995

So Google launched their Twitter/MySpace/Facebook killer, Buzz, and appar­ently sub­scribed every GMail user to it with­out ask­ing any­one for permission.

The result is that a lot of peo­ple now have sen­si­tive per­sonal infor­ma­tion float­ing around in pub­lic. Con­tinue read­ing Pri­vacy: Or why I don’t trust Google with my per­sonal information

A term that’s become very pop­u­lar, and which espe­cially Microsoft’s devel­op­ers seem to cham­pion, is “dog­food­ing”. The idea that as a devel­oper, you should use your own prod­ucts on a daily basis, even dur­ing devel­op­ment. This exposes you to all the weak­nesses and flaws of the prod­uct, and makes you much bet­ter equipped to deliver a prod­uct that’s actu­ally worth using. Con­tinue read­ing The down­side to “dogfooding”

I tried really hard to come up with some witty title or pun to weave into the title of this post. I couldn’t. RAII is just a ter­ri­ble name, and it isn’t really clever or funny. Unfor­tu­nately, it is also the sin­gle most impor­tant key to C++. It is not just an idiom but a fun­da­men­tal phi­los­o­phy used to solve almost any prob­lem in the lan­guage. So we can’t really avoid it.

If I had to pin­point one thing that marked the dif­fer­ence between a skilled and an unskilled C++ pro­gram­mer, it would be “do they under­stand RAII”. Many peo­ple don’t, hence this post. Con­tinue read­ing The mean­ing of RAII  —  or why you never need to worry about resource man­age­ment again

I’m sorry. This isn’t going to be pretty. Con­tinue read­ing Hopes for 2010: Games for Win­dows Live