1/14    Why is NULL defined to be "0" in C++ instead of "((void *) 0)" like in
        C?  I have some overloaded functtions where one takes an integer
        parameter and the other a pointer parameter.  When I call it with
        "NULL", the compiler matches it with the integer version instead of
        the pointer version which is a problem.  Other funny effect is that
        sizeof(NULL) is different from sizeof(myPtr).  Thanks.
	...

4/04    Is there a good way to diff 2 files that consist of columns of
        floating point numbers, such that it only tells me if there's a
        difference if the numbers on a given line differ by at least a given
        ratio?  Say, 1%?
        \_ Use Excel.
           1. Open foo.txt in Excel.  It should convert all numbers to cells in
	...

4/29    Why were C and Java designed to require "break;" statements for a
        "case" section to terminate rather than falling-through to the next
        section?  99% of the time poeple want a "case" section to terminate.
        In fact some compilers issue warning if there is no "break;" statement
        in a "case" section.  Why not just design the languages to have
        termination as the default behavior, and provide a "fallthru;"
	...

7/19    In C or C++, how do I write the code of a function with variable
        number of parameters in order to pass the variable parameters to
        another function that also has variable number of parameters?  Thanks.
        \_ The usual way (works on gcc 3.0+, Visual Studio 2005+):
               #define foo(fmt, ...) printf(fmt, ##__VA_ARGS__)
           The cool new way (works on gcc 4.3+):
	...

3/7     I have a C question.  I have the following source code in two identical
        files t.c and t.cpp:
                #include <stdlib.h>
                int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
                  const char * const * p1;
                  const char * * p2;
	...

2/4     random C programming/linker fu question.  If I have
        int main() { printf("%s is at this adddr %p\n", "strlen", strlen); }
        and soda's /proc/sys/kernel/randomize_va_space is 2 (eg; on)
        why is strlen (or any other libc fn) at the same address every time?
        \_ I don't pretend to actually know the right answer to this, but
           could it have something to do with shared libraries?
	...

2/12    I need a way to make a really big C++ executable (~200MBs) that does
        nothing.  No static initialization either.  Any ideas?
        \_ static link in lots of libraries?
        \_ #define a   i=0; i=0; i=0; i=0; i=0; i=0; i=0; i=0; i=0; i=0;
           #define b   a a a a a a a a a a
           #define c   b b b b b b b b b b
	...

9/28    http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
        Java is #1!!! Followed by C, PHP, C++, Visual Basic, Perl,
        C#, Python, Javascript, then finally Ruby. The good news is
        Pascal is going waaaay back up!
        \_ C is still more popular than C++?  I feel much better about myself
           now.
	...

8/6     In C one can do "typedef int my_index_t;".  What's the equivalent in
        C#?  Thanks.
        \_ C#? Are you serious? Is this what the class of 2009 learn?
           \_ No.  I have to learn .NET code at work.  I am Class of '93.
           \_ python is what 2009 learns, see the motd thread about recent
              cal courses and languages
	...

7/20    For those who care btw, it looks like eclipse is now A Standard Tool
        at UCB ugrad cs, probably replaced emacs.  Furthermore, people get
        angry at seeing Makefiles, (since eclispe takes care of that).  I
        guess it's just a sign of the times.
        \_ The more people at my work use eclipse the less the code is
           managable in emacs.  I'm not sure which application's fault
	...

2/5     I like Adobe Flash. When written correctly, it scales along
        with your browser size. It looks consistent on every single
        browser. It is predictable. On the other hand, I'm not a big
        fan of CSS/HTML, which for the most part, look wildly different
        between browsers, and don't even work consistently or
        correctly at times. So why do so many people (like Steve Jobs)
	...

10/27   http://www.maxgames.com/play/flash-mind-reader.html
        how does this work?
        \_ sh -c 'for ((i=0;i<10;i++)); do for ((j=0;j<10;j++)); do echo "$i$j-(\
$i+$j)" | bc; done ; done' | uniq
        \_ bash -c 'for ((i=0;i<10;i++)); do for ((j=0;j<10;j++)); do echo "$i$j\
-($i+$j)" | bc; done ; done' | uniq
	...

4/19    ORCL u SUNW = ORCL.
        What is Larry Ellison thinking? What is he going to do with a bunch of
        legacy Sun hardware that no one uses anymore, its fading workstation
        customer base, and open source Sun MySQL that doesn't even generate
        revenue? I really don't get all this acquisition business.
        \_ A lot of big companies still use big, fat Sun hardware. Or use
	...

1/15    can any serious development be done on OSX that is not *for OSX*.
        i'll grant that ruby on rails has excellent tutorials for the mac.
        discuss:
        \_ What kind of serious development?  If you want to use the standard
           OSX ui then your ui code will be pretty much useless elsewhere,
           but that's why concepts like MVC are so important.  Otherwise
	...

11/29   I'm experimenting with virtualization, and as a poor college student
        I'm wondering what the best alternatives for virtualization are, and
        how best to cut my teeth on messing with non-linux platforms (or I
        guess interesting stuff on Linux would work too). Right now I've got
        FreeBSD7 running on KVM on my home computer (on a Core 2 Quad), and am
        somewhat at a loss as to how to use it. (More details: bridged
	...

11/13   http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/11/14/financial/f051352S72.DTL
        http://preview.tinyurl.com/6nngpm
        Sun Microsystems Inc. plans to cut up to 6,000 jobs, or 18 percent of
        its global work force, as sales of its high-end computer servers have
        collapsed.  The drastic move announced Friday highlights Sun's
        desperation to cut costs and survive as an independent company. Sun's
	...

11/14   lulz why doesn't GOOG buy JAVA i mean SUN i mean whatever the hell they
        are these days.
        \_ Even GOOG isn't THAT stupid
           \_ Sorry, but WHY would Google do something like that? They
              run 99.2% Linux servers on the backend. They don't use
              Solaris for development. I mean, what does Sun have to
	...

9/24    Why is nscd going crazy?  DoS?
        \- back in the solaris say 2.5-2.6 era, it had both some bugs
           (some malformed nis maps made it go crazy) and architectural
           flaws in the IPC/door+threading mechanism. if you are running
           OS-recent, dunno, but you can trace it.
           \_ Yeah, I think it's just buggy.  I've restarted it, and it seems
	...

4/3     Solaris experts: I've never played with ZFS. Does it have a native
        dump command a la ufsdump?
        \_ This might be what you are looking for:
           http://preview.tinyurl.com/2xqkda [sun - bigadmin]
	...

3/30    Question: I just deleted 60 GB of files from an 80 GB disk. The
        disk activity lights were blinking like crazy and I could hear the
        drive crunch while the data was deleted. This is under Solaris.
        Anyway, I think UNIX uses unlink() when files are deleted. Shouldn't
        it just update the free list on the superblock and call it a day?
        What is all the crunching about?
	...

11/27   I'm using select to do a nonblocking check to see if a single socket
        has anything to read off it.  Problem is, I can have up to 12228
        file descriptors, and Linux fd_set only supports up to 4096.  Any idea
        what I can do about this?  (Or a better solution?) -jrleek
        \- 1. who are you
           2. i am busy this week and you didnt mention language
	...