Introduction to Boost

A few weeks ago I did a presentation at work, nothing high grade, but just a nice overview of some of the more fascinating and useful libraries in the Boost libraries. Since large chunks of Boost are becoming part of the C++ standard in Technical Report 1 it behoves modern C++ developers to have at least a passing familiarity with it. I’ve placed the powerpoint presentation online, and if there’s questions or comments about the material in the slides I’ll be happy to answer them.

The Most Common Interview Question

I’ve been asked this question enough times now that I might as well put it up here for others to ponder. Question first, and comments and discussion after the jump.

You type a url into your web browser, and then press enter. Describe everything that happens from that point onwards in as much detail as possible.

The devil is in the details.
Continue reading The Most Common Interview Question…

Google Interview Questions

A while back I went through an interview at Google. Since I did absolutely horrible (completely and utterly choked), it’s taken a while for the scars to fade. Here are the questions they asked me, in no particular order, during that day.

Continue reading Google Interview Questions…

Mounting dd Images of DisksR

The tool dd is one of the most useful disk manipulation tools available. It’s standard on almost every *nix distribution out there, and is widely considered one of the essential disk manipulation tools. It can easily read from a disk, partition, or other source and write it out to any of the above, and more.

In this brief article I’ll cover a few steps I used to make a backup of a compact flash disk with a proprietary OS and mount the partitions on the disk image.
Continue reading Mounting dd Images of DisksR…

Google Questions: The Phone Screen

Few things inspire as much dread and anxiety as the interview process. This screening process, which precedes any job in our industry, is of debatable value. It’s the worst kind of test: subjective, non-repeatable, and entirely qualitative. If the interview was a computer program, it’d be a thousand lines of spaghetti code held together by string, ducktape, prayer, the phase of the moon, and the color of your tie.
Continue reading Google Questions: The Phone Screen…

Simple Workaround for Py2Exe and .EGG Files

Py2Exe, along with Freeze are two popular packages for combining multiple files, dependencies, shared objects, and resources into a single relocatable package. Unfortunately, Py2Exe doesn’t handle .egg files very easily, which is what quite a few packages out there are distributed in. Using the Cygwin environment to easily create symbolic links, we’re able to simply include the necessary packages in the final distribution.
Continue reading Simple Workaround for Py2Exe and .EGG Files…

Getting Started With ReportLab…

The ReportLab software provides a very useful route to creating PDF documents and reports from within Python in a nice platform independent fashion. It provides a basic ‘canvas’ interface for rendering directly to the document, and a more useful basic layout system called PLATYPUS. I guess they’ve already got their eyes on an O’Reilly animal. In this article I will cover some of the basics of getting started, with a few samples.
Continue reading Getting Started With ReportLab……

Firmware Upgrade of NDS with Supercard and Flashme2

Recently, I flashed my first NDS firmware. The process was, in the end, fairly trivial, though putting all the pieces together (and figuring out exactly what I needed!) was slightly less so. Plus, there’s a good deal of terminology out there regarding the various approaches, and it all gets pretty confusing. I’m going to cover some of the details here, as well as try to answer the questions I had when I was going through the process.
Continue reading Firmware Upgrade of NDS with Supercard and Flashme2…

PostgreSQL Crosstab Example

Here is a bit of usage and demonstration description for the PostgreSQL Crosstab Query I put together in pursuit of something else completely…
Continue reading PostgreSQL Crosstab Example…

Microsoft Access and PostgreSQL Interaction

Microsoft Access does not handle boolean values in a default-compatible fashion with a PostgreSQL backend. Several errors will occur, but are solved via the addition of both of the necessary operator= and operator<> functions to manage the conversion, plus properly configuring the ODBC connection.

Continue reading Microsoft Access and PostgreSQL Interaction…