Two really handy features in C++11 are the range-based for statement and the auto type specifier. The former allows you iterate over collections using a much more compact form of expression, and the latter takes some of the headache out of the complex type declarations encountered in the standard library. Both of these features have [...]

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Despite some harsh words about Visual Studio 11, I’m finding that it makes my heart go pitter-pat every time I use it. Why? Because this early release is finally incorporating a decent set of long-awaited C++11 features. In this article I’ll show you how a little thing like a lambda can make a big difference [...]

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One thing I’ve become accustomed to over the years is that there are a lot of C++ haters. They have their reasons – some good, some bad – but they are never afraid of sharing their opinions. An article on Slashdot this week touting the release of the C++11 standard should have been a hotbed [...]

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A few weeks back I was looking at the choice of whether to use iterators or streaming operations for I/O on my data compression code. I was bemoaning the fact that the C++ iterators that perform stream I/O use the insertion and extraction operators, making them unsuitable for binary data compression. It looks like I [...]

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It looks like all my long years of studying data compression might be ready to pay off: Hello Good Day, This is Troop Emonds With regards to your Company i am sending this email Regards to order some( Compression Machine )I will like to know the type and sizes you have in stock and get [...]

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I recently spent a little over two weeks touring New Zealand. It was a self-driving trip, which meant we got to cover a lot of ground, although certainly the coverage was very shallow. Before this trip, I had not set foot on foreign soil more than one mile from the US border, so the experience [...]

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I was in Christchurch, New Zealand, recently and had a chance to meet Tim for the first time in person. Tim teaches at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, and is Deputy Head of the Computer Science and Software Engineering department. I got a chance to ask him about his work in data compression as well as one of his new areas of interest, Computer Science education.

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When I updated my LZW reference code to use the latest C++ features, I abstracted my input and output functions using templates. Data was read and written using the iostreams paradigm, which requires simple classes that implement just a few functions. Would I have been better off using the iterator paradigm instead? The C++ algorithms [...]

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Windows users who need a command line connection to another system via telnet or SSH are big fans of PuTTY. It’s free, it has every feature you need, and it’s reliable. One thing many people would like to do is use PuTTY as a component in their program. Apparently this comes up so often enough [...]

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This summer I’m teaching a graduate class, Principles of UNIX, which is more or less a crash course in the Mother of All Operating Systems. One of our early topics is email on UNIX, in which I try to impart to the class just how transformative email was back in the day. For early Internet [...]

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