Perl: Practical or Pathologically Eclectic? Both?

Posted on November 30, 2013 by rlc

There are two canonical acronyms for Perl: “Practical Extraction and Report Language” and “Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister”. Arguably, Perl can be both.

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A few thoughts on BitCoin

Posted on November 28, 2013 by rlc

Mindmap of a few thoughts on BitCoin I’d meant to turn into prose (still might)

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Vlinder Software announces Arachnida version 2.2

Posted on November 26, 2013 by Ronald Landheer-Cieslak
Vlinder Software is announcing the release of version 2.2 of Arachnida, our HTTP server framework for embedded devices. This version introduces two important features: a hardened, more versatile OpenSSL plug-in: we’ve scrapped the plug-in that was originally created for version … Continue reading →
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Qt to quickly write a GUI app

Posted on September 28, 2013 by rlc

Today, my wife asked me to write an app that would tell her to sit straight every 15 minutes. I know apps like that already exist and I could’ve pointed her to one, but I decided to write one myself. The result is tannez-moi (which is French for “bother me”).
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The benefits of formal, executable specifications

Posted on September 25, 2013 by rlc

While a specification should not specify the C++ code that should be implemented for the specified feature, it should specify the feature in a verifiable manner. In some cases, formal — and even executable — specifications can be of great help.
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Why #fixthathouse?

Posted on September 23, 2013 by rlc

Those of you who follow me on Twitter might wonder why, all of a sudden, I started tweeting assertions with the #fixthathouse hashtag. The reason is simple, CBC The House made me do it.
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Run-time composed predicates and Code generation

Posted on September 20, 2013 by rlc

While working on Arachnida, preparing version 2.2 due out this fall, one of the things we’ll be introducing is a hardened OpenSSL transport-layer-security plug-in, to replace the one we’ve had for the last seven or so years. One of the new features in this plug-in (which is part of Arachnida’s “Scorpion” module) is a much more flexible configuration scheme including the subject of today’s post: run-time composed predicates.

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Posted in C & C++, C++ for the self-taught, Software Design | Leave a comment

Common nonsense: the charter of Quebec Values

Posted on September 13, 2013 by rlc

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Four of these need not apply for a government job in Quebec if the new PQ charter of values becomes law. Can you pick the one that might still get the job?

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Sometimes, your right hand should know what your left hand is doing

Posted on September 4, 2013 by rlc

Especially if you’re a compiler…

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Conditional in-place merge algorithm

Posted on July 3, 2013 by rlc

Say you have a sorted sequence of objects.

Go ahead, say: “I have a sorted sequence of objects!”

Now say it’s fairly cheap to copy those objects, you need to be space-efficient and your sequence may have partial duplicates — i.e. objects that, under some conditions, could be merged together using some transformation.

OK, so don’t say it. It’s true anyway. Now we need an algorithm to

  1. check for each pair of objects in the sequence whether they can be transformed into a single object
  2. apply the transformation if need be

Let’s have a look at that algorithm.

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