Posted inInformation Technology

Linux and USB Floppy Drives

Everybody thinks they are dead, but floppy disks are still around and you basically need a USB floppy drive to use them because modern motherboards don’t have a header connection for the ribbon cable internal drives need. I know own two USB floppy drives because I forgot I had an IBM portable floppy drive buried under a bunch of portable DVD R/W drives behind a bunch of Super Floppies. Why this post now? I was … Linux and USB Floppy DrivesRead more

Posted inExperience / Information Technology

C++ — Never Do’s

No, Never Do isn’t a new loop type though it can be what happens when you ASS-U-ME a default value for a loop variable. These are some things you should never do in your code. I’ve spent nearly 40 years in IT now. For the past decade I’ve been working in the medical device realm. Prior to that I wrote great big boring systems for great big companies. This be what you don’t do in … C++ — Never Do’sRead more

Posted inInformation Technology

A Linux Distro That Doesn’t Force Updates Like Windows

I really hate it when a search takes me to a “Stack” site, especially a Linux based “Stack” site. Everybody who does anything serious with Linux is looking for a desktop distro that doesn’t force updates out. When you work in the safety critical systems world you will fail a binary audit if even one version of one library is different on the system. So, I knew I shouldn’t click the link going to this … A Linux Distro That Doesn’t Force Updates Like WindowsRead more

Posted inInformation Technology

C++ – Defaults and Deletes – Pt. 3

In this installment for Defaults and Deletes we finish the code for the example program. So far, among the things you have learned is that the default deconstructor does basically nothing. Near Heap allocations are reclaimed automatically when you return from a method/function. For Far Heap objects all it does is free the allocation. It will not free any sub allocations. You have already been shown the code for the ImplicitClass so we will not … C++ – Defaults and Deletes – Pt. 3Read more

Posted inInformation Technology

C++ – Defaults and Deletes – Pt. 2

Before we go much further with this discussion on Defaults and Deletes, I need you to read the section titled Near Heap in this blog post. It’s a short read with pictures. Then you need to go thank the fools . . . err . . . “learned academics”, cough cough, who re-purposed the word heap to be a binary tree data structure. To understand why things are the way they are, I need you … C++ – Defaults and Deletes – Pt. 2Read more