Tom Lachecki

(Tomalak Geret'kal)

Nobody Writes Testcases Any More…

When I say "testcases", I don't mean a unit test, or even a functional test, or any set of instructions to verify the correctness of a program. I'm talking about the reduced example you create when you're debugging a program you already know to be functioning incorrectly. Let me demonstrate.

Line endings and Bash red herrings

It's just taken a colleague and I a number of hours — on release day, naturally — to track down a fault with a shell script, because Bash was unclear in its error reporting.

Can't Add A "Picture Location" For Desktop Wallpapers in Windows 7?

If, like me, you have disabled Windows 7's "Libraries" feature, and later found that you are unable to add "Picture Locations" for your desktop wallpaper, you don't have to workaround it by manually copying your desired wallpaper into a default folder.

What To Do When Your VB.NET Project Icon "Sticks"

So you have your Visual Basic 2008 Express project. When you created it, you assigned some placeholder icon to serve as the project's icon. The icon shows up alongside the compiled executable in Windows Explorer, and everything's fine. Or is it?

The Dynamic Allocation Of Sandcastles

Today I came across this excellent analogy by a gentleman named "DavidWolfire" describing the initialisation, use and discarding of dynamically-allocated memory in C-like languages.

C++11 Auto Misunderstood Already

It has begun: There is no such thing as "an auto"! See, this is why I disagreed with the proposal to add this syntactic sugar.

Back To Stack Overflow, And Look What's Happened

Last year I "left" Stack Overflow but, as predicted, recently found myself trickling back onto it for the fame and glory. Then, this.

Auto_ptr and forward declarations: basically, don't

I made a mistake that could have cost my application its stability. Learn from the error of my ways!

Externals Should Never Point To HEAD And This Is Why (I told you so)

Why you should never point svn:externals to a dependency source tree's HEAD, and how spectacularly things go wrong when you do.

Why Caution Is Advised When SVN Copying Directories

svn copy's behaviour when copying directories to paths that already exist does not quite match that of Linux's cp command.

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