Posted inExperience / Information Technology

Review – McAfee Total Protection

McAfee Total Protection is a shining example of why no company should ever use Agile. I’m a long way from newbie in the software world. I mean over 30 years of software consulting on many different platforms in quite a few different industries should count for something. Heck, I even write an award winning technical book series. This software is looking up at worthless hoping to one day be that good. ☆☆☆☆☆ Forget About Your … Review – McAfee Total ProtectionRead more

Posted inExperience / Information Technology

A std::vector Example and Explanation

If you want a really good method of identifying a legacy C++ library/framework, see if it provides a vector class. For C this would be a set of vector functions. Arrays in C and C++ are hard coded at compile time. This dates back to the beginning of the languages. During the early 1980s VAX BASIC was the only widely used programming language supporting dynamic arrays. You may not be familiar with BASIC but the … A std::vector Example and ExplanationRead more

Posted inBooks / Publishing

Finding the Zodiac Killer by David Daniel

True Crime,  Serial Killers True Accounts ,  Crime & Criminal Biographies Date Published:  October 1, 2023   In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a serial killer, who called himself the ZODIAC, terrorized Northern California with cold-blooded murders and a series of taunting ciphers and letters. His first set of three ciphers, considered at the time to be one, were sent to three newspapers in 1969. They were cracked by a couple within a week. … Finding the Zodiac Killer by David DanielRead more

Posted inExperience / Information Technology

The Danger of Tuples

No matter how much academics and the industry tries to shit on BASIC, C++ and every other newer language tries to move closer to it. Tuples are the re-introduction of a very bad thing. Well, not so much bad as highly abused. To understand my viewpoint you probably need to read page 4-100 (page 278 in the PDF) of this manual. FIELD The FIELD statement originated in BASIC/PLUS on the PDP-11. Might have started with … The Danger of TuplesRead more

Posted inInformation Technology

Trigraphs and Digraphs

I remember thinking trigraphs were a cheap hack when they were first introduced. Now that I’m old I get called on to help “modernize” legacy code. Keyboard images courtesy of Admiral Shark’s Keyboards. Too much of the information posted on-line about Trigraphs and Digraphs is incomplete or just plain wrong. Those who have only ever worked on x86 hobby computer systems blame the 7-bit ASCII-ish ISO 646 character set not having some of the critical … Trigraphs and DigraphsRead more