Showing archive results for 2008

Who knew that in-flight safety videos could be so popular? Introduced to the world on the Delta blog, the latest Delta in-flight safety video has generated quite a buzz around the Internet. Well, more accurately, the buzz surrounds the video's star, flight attendant Katherine Lee, known to her drooling fans as Deltalina, with secondary attent...

As we noted last time, structure tags are different from the typedef name as a historical artifact of earlier versions of the C language. But what about just leaving out the name entirely? One problem with this approach is that it becomes impossible to make a forward reference to this structure because it has no name. For example, if you wanted...

My trip to Lisbon entailed a connection in Paris at Charles de Gaulle International Airport. So now, I've technically been to France, but since I never left the airport, I don't think it really counts. (When I mentioned to one of my colleagues that I paid a brief visit to his native country, he replied, "I hope it went okay." Off my confused expre...

In Windows header files, many structures are declared like this: Why is the structure name different from typedef name? This is a holdover from very early versions of the C language where structure tags, union tags, and typedefs were kept in the same namespace. Consequently, you couldn't say . At the open brace, the compiler registers as a s...

Today is Waffle Day in Sweden, and the reason why today of all days is Waffle Day I find quite amusing. March 25th is the Feast of The Annunciation according to the Catholic Church calendar, the day on which the archangel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would conceive a child, the Son of God. Why March 25th? The date was arrived at by the follo...

When you go through Windows header files, you'll see types with names , , , and so on. What's the difference between these types and the uncapitalized ones? Well, there isn't one any more. What follows is an educated guess as to the story behind these types. The application binary interface for an operating system needs to be unambiguous. Everyb...

One thing I noticed in Lisbon is that I will occasionally see a bus or tram whose destination sign says Reservado. I couldn't find a place called Reservado anywhere in my guide book. It must be new. Hi, everybody. I'm back from vacation, and it's taken me a while to catch up on all that happened while I was away. In addition to deleting all the t...

Not much any more.

Another installment in the extremely sporadic series on how to write like Raymond. On occasion, I'll find myself engaged in a mail thread with a customer who refuses to believe what they're being told and is under the impression that rephrasing the question will get a different answer. "My customer wants to control the name and appearance of the ...

It's that time again: Raymond comes up with an absurd, arbitrary criterion for filling out his NCAA bracket. This time, I studied all the games played in the NCAA men's basketball tournament since 1985 and computed how many of the games were won by the favorite and how many were upsets, broken down by the numerical difference between the seeding...