Since LiveJournal has been showing increasingly flashy and annoying ads, I'm moving this thing back to a hosted blog service. WordPress has a pretty nice LiveJournal importer, so I'm going to give wordpress.com a try. Whatever service I'm using will be linked to from http://eschew.org/blog/.

So, a pop quiz. Suppose you write a C++ program using class B provided in a library, like so:

#include "some-header.h"
int main() {
B* p = new B();
return 0;
}
The snippet above compiles and links just fine. So the snippet below should build too, right? Mind you, the base class is not doing anything sneaky. In particular, it does not have a ( Read more... )

Quick PSA: I've updated the Reddit Highligher Script to work with the changes Reddit made to their site structure a while back. I've also added highlighting stories based on linked domain name or link title, the easier to not miss anything related to Diablo III. One can never be too prepared, eh?

I've been tormented the past few days about an article I read several years ago. I barely even remember what it was about, only that the author played very clever tricks with the preprocessor's token pasting functionality to push the limits of what the preprocessor can do. Maybe it was a parameterized repetition macro? Something like that. I do ( Read more... )

Why We Program:
The ability to create is the most empowering thing that can happen to an individual.
-- Patrick Awuah

So, back towards the beginning of the semester, we had a simple assignment in Data Compression: compute pixel differences for an image file. The differences will be defined "going backwards" -- the i'th difference will be the i'th value, minus the (i-1)th value (as opposed to the (i+1)th). So, including a "virtual" pixel value of 128 at the ( Read more... )

So, the Summer of Code 2008 projects were posted a few days ago.

A few of the ones I think are particularly interesting:

PHP: Zend LLVM Extension
Vim: On-the-fly Code Checker, Visual Studio 2005/2008 Plugin
Python: Django on the JVM
Mercurial: Rebasing, svn tools, partial cloning, TortoiseHG for Linux
LLVM: C++ classes support, llvm/clang distcc, ( Read more... )

In 10 hours, I'll be going across the country for a few days to see my brother and take advantage of the ridiculous amount of snow Oregon has been getting. After that, I'll be home for a few days, and then off to Canada for the ACM Programming Contest. I'll be back April 10.

According to Wikipedia, in the last ten years, approximately 96 people have been killed and 94 wounded by school shootings.

The census in 2000 showed a total of 33.86 million students at the high school level or above. That gives (190/10)/(33.86e6/1e5), which works out to a rate of approximately .056 per 100000 students being killed or injured per ( Read more... )

My sister and I have been independently growing more cognizant of money. One interesting finance site is Mint. It looks very convenient, but I feel more than a little squeamish about putting my financial information in a third party website.

Mint also has a blog that's chock-full of useful tips. In one post, they give a quick overview of the ( Read more... )