Yvan Seth's Hole in the Internet

There are a lot more "Debian", aka Ubuntu, users around the place these days. In general it seems many newer users have been spoilt by Ubuntu's regular release schedule. Back in the old days we sometimes waited years between Debian releases, if there was something you needed that wasn't in your antique but "stable" Debian you'd have to use backports, if you were lucky enough to find what you wanted there, backport a package for yourself (thanks to the Debian package build tools being mostly friendly), or just compile from source.

Continue reading Backporting an Ubuntu/Debian Package - spatialite for Jaunty.

All these years I've been making regular use of good old std::endl without realising that it is a templated function! We live in a crazy world. Somewhere in the back of my head I guess I'd just assumed it was simply platform-dependant constant… not quite.

Continue reading std::endl.

I play with the snake from time to time, Python having now almost entirely supplanted Perl as my hak-n-slash language. But I'm certainly still learning as I go. Today I've been trying to work out what's gone wrong with something I'm doing. I thought I'd done something strange with inheritance, not understanding some case where inheritance causes data to become static (in the sense of static members in C++.) What was really the problem is that I didn't realise that default parameters to members are kept and reused, and if you go and use a parameter you can end up with state being held on to where you don't (well, I didn't) expect it.

Continue reading Bitten by the python.

I should have known better, in fact I'm pretty sure I did know better, but it is so easy to fall into the trap of using reference members as often as possible. Actually, in other code I've not done this, so I'll call it a "typo", yeah. :)

Continue reading Don't store references to boost::shared_ptr.