<p>Like pretty much every other programmer with a Mac, I’m currently looking at <a href="https://developer.apple.com/swift/">Swift</a>. Will I write anything but toy programs in it? I don’t know yet - I don’t really write any Mac-ish software on my Mac, just unix-ish programs. If Swift doesn’t escape the OS X and iOS ecosystems it’ll be a nice exercise in a neat language that’s not really that relevant to the world at large, or at least to my part of the…
<p>For those of us who remember when the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro">BBC Micro</a> was the home computer with the fastest Basic implementation available, a long time ago, and was pretty legendary in home computing circles in Europe. It didn’t sell that much outside of the UK, mostly because of its price. It was also the target system for the original implementation of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_%28video_game%29">Elite</a>. <a…
<p>When it comes to Emacs, I <em>am</em> an amateur at best, but part of the fun is that I keep discovering new useful functionality.</p>
<p>It’s one of those days, thanks to a hard disk going south I ended up having to rebuild the system drive on one of my machines. After putting the important software back on there - “Outlook and Emacs”, as one of my colleagues calls it - I had to reapply some of the usual tweaks that make a generic developer workstation <em>my</em> developer workstation.</p>
<p>Admittedly I’m not the biggest fan of <a href="http://git-scm.com/">git</a> - I prefer <a href="http://mercurial.selenic.com/">Mercurial</a> - but we’re using it at work and it does a good job as a DVCS. However, we’re mostly a Windows shop and the out of the box performance of <a href="http://msysgit.github.io/">Git for Windows</a> is anything but stellar when you are using ssh as the transport for git. That’s not too much bother with most of our repos but we have a…
<p>I used to use <a href="http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CarbonEmacsPackage">Carbon Emacs</a> on OS X for quite a while, but with the release of Emacs 24 I switched to the stock GNU Emacs distribution. While GNU Emacs works fine on OS X, once you throw a German keyboard layout in the mix it doesn’t work so well as OS X uses Option + Number keys for a variety of characters needed for programming like [] and {}. GNU Emacs uses Option as Meta out of the box so the key mapping doesn’t…
<p>I recently came across a discussion on LinkedIn where someone had run into memory related undefined behaviour. This prompted me to write this post as it’s a common, subtle and often not very well understood bug that’s easily introduced into C++ code.</p>
<p>Not that I’m doing much with it yet other than the more minibuffer completion, but I really notice when <a href="http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/Icicles">icicles</a> is not installed or inactive, so I’ve ended up adding it to every Emacs installation I use. <a href="http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ELPA">ELPA</a> is coming in really handy as it’s a matter of just installing icicles via one of its repos rather than having to install it manually. I’m really going off manual…
<p>Visual Studio 2013, much like its predecessor Visual Studio 2012, also “features” the SHOUTY uppercase menus. Like in Visual Studio 2012, these can be <a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/zainnab/archive/2013/08/21/visual-studio-2013-turn-off-the-uppercase-menu.aspx">turned off using a registry setting</a>.</p>
<p>I was playing with the various shell options - sorry, trying to learn eshell - this evening. While playing with eshell I learned about the second, fully fledged terminal emulator ansi-term.</p>
