Welcome to Atalasoft Community Sign in | Help

March 2006 - Posts

Wednesday, March 29, 2006 3:22 PM

Looking for a hobby, eh?

This is less about tech and more about the time you're not at a keyboard (what?! You mean there is life away from the computer?) Let's say that you're a software engineer and you find yourself with a copious amount of free time (ha!) and you're looking
Posted by Steve Hawley | 0 Comments
Monday, March 27, 2006 7:05 PM

Indirection

A few months back I was reading this blog and kept this quote from Alan Kay in my mind: "any problem in Computer Science could be solved by adding another level of indirection". I also think that more than three levels of indirection creates all kinds
Posted by Steve Hawley | 1 Comments
Thursday, March 16, 2006 6:22 PM

Varargs are bad, m'kay.

Varargs are a facility in C for managing functions with a variable number of arguments. In the dim dark days of C, any function could be passed any number of arguments as long as that number was greater than or equal to the number of arguments declared
Posted by Steve Hawley | 6 Comments
Thursday, March 16, 2006 3:26 PM

Nice Surprise

I'm doing some experiments to find out what happens if I put one layer of abstraction into some performance-critical code. I was fully expecting to have to write it in "the obvious way" and then to have to bust my butt optimizing it. In my first experiment,
Posted by Steve Hawley | 0 Comments
Sunday, March 12, 2006 4:09 PM

Code Blur

One thing I've notice about the software engineering community is that there are a lot of musicians. It's not just a case of someone who played recorder in grade school. There's some real talent hiding behind the faces that write your iterators and mapping
Posted by Steve Hawley | 0 Comments
Thursday, March 09, 2006 3:20 PM

Building a VM

In 1995 or so, I wrote an emulator for the 6800 processor. This was not an unfamiliar task in that I'd written an emulator for the 6502 in college as well as a few fictitious processors. The 6800 took me a weekend (which says a lot about my social life
Posted by Steve Hawley | 0 Comments
Tuesday, March 07, 2006 10:37 PM

Rubrics and Hiring

This is going to be brief and somewhat non-technical. I want to take a little time to talk about hiring. There comes a time in every company where it is necessary to hire on help and you need to go beyond your immediate circle of friends/peers/cronies.
Posted by Steve Hawley | 0 Comments
Friday, March 03, 2006 1:49 PM

Robotron and OOP

Many years back, joe holt and I pulled the ROMs from a Robotron machine that I bought. Joe write a disassembler for 6809 and we started poring over the assembly language to try to make head or tail of its operation using the schematics as a guide for
Posted by Steve Hawley | 1 Comments
Thursday, March 02, 2006 8:48 AM

Language Zealotry

From my recent post about what a computer can do, there are a number of mathematical theorems that bear it out. One is the notion of Turing Completeness . In essence, a computer or computing model is Turing Complete if it can be emulated by a Turing machine.
Posted by Steve Hawley | 1 Comments