Pesches Schlauch

If you are using any SCM that allows cheap branches (like Perforce) and are following the advices from the High-level Best Practices document, you might be interested in (or already know) Laura Wingerd’s presentation Convergence vs. Divergence: Purposeful Merging with Perforce about how to converge to codelines using Merge Down, Copy Up [PDF]. I [...]

I’m cleaning up shelves and have got an old “SIBO SDK 2.10″ which I haven’t used in years. It is a Software Development Kit for 16-Bit Psion handheld computers like Psion Series 3 or Psion Workabout.
If you are interested in two floppy disks and four folders of documentation, please drop me a note.

Did you ever have the need to use different versions of Microsofts Visual C++ compiler from the command line? Did you wish you wouldn’t have to constantly call vcvars32.bat or change your environment (PATH, INCLUDE and LIB variables)?
In comes a little tool called envvc.exe. It sets the environment for the chosen version and then calls [...]

There are already many solutions to the “Santa Claus Problem” by John Trono[1]. It’s a “problem simple to understand and yet far from easy to solve”; the author’s original solution (based on semaphores) was only partly correct. The probably most known analysis of the problem was written by Mordechai Ben-Ari[2], who also provided solutions in [...]

At work, we started using dmake in 1991 (or even earlier) for building the firmware for the Vending Machine Controller Euro’90. The firmware consisted mostly of PL/M and C code and the compilers suffered from the DOS limitation of 127 characters per command line. Dennis Vadura’s dmake 3.70 (hosted by the University of Waterloo and [...]

Even before I upgraded to OS X 10.4 (Tiger), I got the report that the Save File dialog in Realpolitik crashes. Now I have applied a quick’n’dirty fix for the next couple of days for all Tiger users and released Realpolitik 1.7.0 Alpha 2 earlier than planned.
Currently I’m revamping the dialogs known to Mac developers [...]

The four days at the ACCU Conference in Oxford are over. Except Günter nobody seems to have blogged the C++ track.
Apart from the discussions and presentations what should go into the next C++ standard (called C++0x and scheduled for 2009), one of the big topics was concurrency and a new awareness that some new ideas [...]

After much carbonizing by Ben Hines and some polishing by me a new Realpolitik Release is available on Sourceforge, the first release for OS X.
The release version Realpolitik 1.7.0 Alpha1 is not yet stable (hence Alpha 1), there are still some known (and probably many more unknown) errors like selection and redrawing problems with the [...]

Longtime Apple developers probably know this intuitively, but I needed some time to figure it out: When CVS-ing files with a resource fork, you must not use the /usr/bin/cvs that ships with OS X!
Because Apple used to separate data and metadata, most files in the pre OS X era had a data fork and a [...]

Every year after christmas the El Niño Cup takes place. It is a tournament where the result is less important than exercising and having fun. There is a team day, where every team plays Volleyball, Basketball and Unihockey, and a single day, where the disciplines are Badminton, Table Tennis and Archery.
Last year I wrote a [...]