Rantings, ravings and the occasional cogent comment
An analysis of the report on NASA’s Management of Its Commercial Crew Program. Main Findings NASA’s Commercial Crew Program succeeded in restoring U.S. crew access through SpaceX, but Boeing’s Starliner remains the central failure point. NASA expected both providers to be ready by 2017; SpaceX was certified in 2020 and has flown regular crew missions, [ ]
A classic 1990s Usenet crank was not just “a person with a wrong idea.” The defining feature was a self-sealing relationship to argument: every correction became more evidence that the crank was misunderstood, persecuted, or ahead of their time. The psychology usually had several parts. 1. Private theory as identity The crank’s claim was not [ ]
or, Three Words That Started My Career It Started With PLATO When I was barely a teenager, my sister Carol was taking courses at the University of Delaware. My parents met at the university and ended up living in the town that was home to the university. At least one of my sister s courses had [ ]
I recently gave the talk Refactoring: The Long Game at MavenLink, a local software firm. MavenLink works by doing strict test-driven development and pair programming all the time. MavenLink has an office in Salt Lake City and an office in San Francisco. It s a really interesting place to work. MavenLink provided me with a recording [ ]
If you re not careful, entropy creeps its way into your code base. You take a shortcut or code something in a way that you know is sloppy and you say to yourself I ll come back to that later , but later you re faced with new feature requests or some other Imminent Disaster(tm) and you don t go [ ]
Telemarketing spam has now become a Turing test and I predict it will only get moreso in the future. (Phone rings.) Me: Yes? Robot: Hello, my name is Betty, I d like to talk to you about blah blah blah. Me: Are you a human being? Robot: (Pause for voice recognition.) Yes! I m just talking to [ ]
In programming we have to come up with names for lots of things on a day-to-day basis. Naming things is hard. Lots of times we come up with names that we re not particularly happy with, but it may be the best name we could think of at the time. Later we get a better idea [ ]
Here s a fun survey question: name as many two-character Unix commands as you can and say what they do. Let s be precise about what we mean by a command : Shell aliases like la are not commands. Shell built-in commands count as commands; over time the shell incorporated directly things that were previously separate executables in [ ]
OpenWest 2017 has accepted my proposed talk on Embedded C++ Development for the Game Boy Advance. I will be presenting this talk on Wednesday, July 12th from 4:00 pm to 4:50 pm. If you are interested in C++ for embedded development, I think you will enjoy this presentation. We ll be showing how the Zero Overhead [ ]
Daz Studio 4.9.3 has been released, with an updated implementation of NVIDIA s IRay. Daz Studio is the first to market with this new version of IRay bringing support for Pascal generation GPUs from NVIDIA. We ve also added automatic login to make it more convenient to purchase and install content directly from the Daz store. We [ ]
Tommy Bennett gave a great lightning talk at CppCon 2016 entitled Algorithm Mnemonics: Increase Your Productivity With STL Algorithms . This was really two lightning talks jammed into one. In the second half, Tommy talks about how to increase your productivity with the vim editor simply by learning to use Ctrl+[ instead of ESC because of [ ]
At this month s Utah C++ Programmers meetup, I ll be presenting the basics of invoking SIMD CPU instruction set extensions using compiler intrinsics functions. SIMD Parallelism with CPU Intrinsics (MMX, SSE, AVX, etc.) Wednesday, July 13, 2016 6:00 PM 8:00 PM Food will be provided, courtesy of our sponsor Apremis Technology Placement. Thanks, Apremis! Please [ ]
When you join a team with a large existing code base, it can be intimidating. How long does it take to become familiar with a million lines of code? I don t have the answer to that question, but based on my past experience it easily takes several years if not more. Meanwhile, the rest of [ ]
This month, Greg Hodgson will give us a presentation on concurrency and parallelism with thread . Thanks for presenting, Greg!
I have posted the slide decks for my Spring 2016, Utah Code Camp are available on slideshare.net: Cross-Platform Mobile Development with Visual Studio 2015 and C++ Modern C++ Thanks to everyone who attended Code Camp and a very special thanks to all the sponsors that make the event happen!
It s that time of year again and I ve proposed the following talks for the 2016 Utah Code Camp. Please vote for those you d like to see as I doubt I will be able to give all of them :-). Vote here: Utah Code Camp Spring 2016 Sessions Update: Two of my talks were accepted, thank [ ]
I have uploaded my slides for my presentation on Creating and Consuming Libraries in C++. Not every word of what I discussed is in the slides, but there should be enough there for you to follow the discussion.
In this month s Utah C++ Programmers meetup, I ll present the basics on consuming and creating libraries for C++ programs. ConsultNet is now a sponsor of Utah C++ Programmers and will be providing us with food for the meeting. Thanks, ConsultNet! Some of the topics to be discussed include: What is a header only library? What [ ]
Microsoft has released a release candidate of Update 2 for Visual Studio 2015. Of interest to C++ developers are the completion of C++11, C++14 and current C++17 library features as well as numerous performance and bug fix improvements to the IDE and the compiler. There are some breaking changes for existing code bases that were [ ]
Tomorrow the Salt Lake City Software Craftsmanship group will be holding their 2nd meetup. The reading discussion topic for this month is Rewrite or Refactor?. Dinner will be served and there will be a programming exercise after the reading discussion. See you there!