First off, I haven’t installed any of the Windows 8 previews myself because I lack a spare machine (Virtual PC doesn’t work). I did follow Building Windows 8 and other weblogs and previews rather closely. What I’ve seen was increasingly troublesome, culminating in the following articles on the final Windows 8 Release Preview: Michael Mace: … Continue reading “Windows 8 Doom & Gloom”
Author: Christoph Nahr
Tektosyne 5.6.3 Released
Uploaded Tektosyne 5.6.3 with some new rectangle functions for relative point locations. The User’s Guide got a minor update as well, for the new RectLocation enumeration. Speaking of which, this enumeration calls the edge coordinates StartX/Y and EndX/Y as in LineD/F/I, rather than Left/Right/Top/Bottom as in RectD/F/I. The LRTB model originally seemed like a good … Continue reading “Tektosyne 5.6.3 Released”
RNG Range Projection
RNG Range Projection is a new page discussing the pitfalls of projecting the output of a pseudo-random number generator with a small native range (specifically, the rand() function of MS Visual C++) into an arbitrary target range. This page essentially replicates the contents of a plain text file that used to be included with my … Continue reading “RNG Range Projection”
Static Analysis in the Real World
Vivek Haldar’s recent post Bug finding and static analysis in the real world covers the application of two static analysis tools, FindBugs and Coverity, on large commercial software systems. The Coverity article is a cornucopia of terrifying anecdotes from the trenches of C/C++ development. Here are some gems: “Isn’t that bad? What happens if you … Continue reading “Static Analysis in the Real World”
No Macros in Visual Studio 11
Microsoft certainly didn’t bother to advertise this whopper in their VS11 blog posts: Visual Studio 11 drops macro support, including the separate Macros IDE, the VB-like macro language, and even recording & replaying keystrokes! I only just noticed this because of an InfoQ post mentioned on Twitter. To be sure, there are plenty of other … Continue reading “No Macros in Visual Studio 11”
Eric Woodruff takes over Sandcastle
Eric Woodruff has taken over all future maintenance of the Sandcastle documentation compiler. The newly fixed release, plus Eric’s existing GUI and improved style sheets, are now included in his Sandcastle Help File Builder. On the bright side, this is the best thing that could possibly have happened to the project. In the past six … Continue reading “Eric Woodruff takes over Sandcastle”
Blogger Country Redirection
You may have noticed that Blogger weblogs appear as <i>name</i>.blogspot.com in a link, but automatically redirect to a domain in your country of residence when you click on them, e.g. <i>name</i>.blogspot.de. As it turns out, this is a Google trick to allow country-specific censorship without harming global access to a given weblog. However, Google also … Continue reading “Blogger Country Redirection”
Uncontested Lock Performance
Recently I wondered about the performance cost of preemptively putting monitor locks on small library methods that might conceivably be called from multiple threads. That’s a great subject for a micro-benchmark, so I wrote a few tests in C# and Java and posted the results in Uncontested Lock Performance. As it turns out, standard locking … Continue reading “Uncontested Lock Performance”
More on DITA Typesetting with FOP, OT & Oxygen
Just completed my planned additions to DITA Typesetting with Oxygen XML Editor. This article now covers the following aspects of creating PDF output using Oxygen and its included open-source packages, Apache FOP and DITA Open Toolkit: Support for bookmap metadata, or lack thereof Using OpenType fonts with PostScript outlines Incorporating PDF files as images in … Continue reading “More on DITA Typesetting with FOP, OT & Oxygen”
Correction on FOP/DITA font-base path
In DITA Typesetting with Oxygen XML Editor, I had specified font-base as a relative path, trusting that Oxygen would always run its transformations from the same directory. Turns out that is not the case, and suddenly my transformations couldn’t find their custom fonts anymore. Changing font-base to an absolute path fixes this issue. Also retitled … Continue reading “Correction on FOP/DITA font-base path”