This week I explore how, after struggling with my Windows 7 grinding to a halt over the last few months, I finally managed to get it up to speed again.

I ask everyone to stop using the erroneous term "STL".

One of the evilnesses of the C++ Standard Library is that implementations — be they GCC's libstdc++ or the Dimkumware implementation used by MSVC — are free to have their headers include other standard headers as much as they like. This can lead to confusion.

I briefly explore a common inheritance gotcha and its usual solution.

One of the most well-known "web 2.0" buzzwords is AJAX ("Asynchronous Javascript And XML") which, properly known as XMLHttpRequest is a mechanism to provoke the retrieval of data from a webserver at times other than the initial loading of a webpage. You see it when your Gmail inbox refreshes, or when you turn the page in a Facebook photo album. Unfortunately, AJAX is somewhat misunderstood.

A programmer friend recently revealed that his company has a strict no-tabs policy, and that they are forced to use space indentation… at no fewer than eight spaces. This makes me sad. I explain why.

If like me you lament the passing of the days when Facebook was just a tool used by twenty-somethings to post photos and have the odd flirty wallpost conversation with friends, you'll be at least partially as saddened as I to see it in the big news once again. And, once again, it's over "privacy".

I address the age-old debate of C and C++; which pointer initialisation syntax to use?

I compare several approaches to object initialisation in C++.

I explore a few oddities with templates and types in C++.