Tom Lachecki

Upon updating Windows 7 for the first time in a while and rebooting, I was soon horrified to discover that I was unable to connect to any remote hosts over the internet. Let's find out why.

In an unprecedented feat of miraculousness, Freenode's ##C++ discussion channel saw — in the space of no more than twenty minutes — the same question asked twice of one of C++'s more subtle features. Just how do you declare a friend from the global namespace? I find out.

For a while now, I've had a slightly frustrating problem with Windows key mappings. This week it became irritating, so I finally decided to look into a fix… or, at the very least, a workaround.

I briefly explore an odd case of misbehaviour from clang.

Right or wrong, it's still trendy in some C++ circles to use the singleton pattern for defining a type that can only be instantiated at most once in an execution run. However, this can cause problems when you bring more static data into the mix.

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.

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.

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.

I explore the removal of the Start Menu-docked Address Bar from Windows XP as of SP3.

Meet Lauren. Lauren wants to find a laptop for under US$1000, with a 17" screen and a comfortable keyboard amongst other criteria.

She's promised by anonymous voiceover man (who's graphically accompanied by a contemporary Windows logo) that if she can find what she's looking for, they'll buy it for her.