Microsoft’s implementation of unordered_map in Visual Studio 10 has performance issues so severe it may be unusable in your projects.

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In this updated look at LZW, I will first give a description of how LZW works, then describe the core C++ code that I use to implement the algorithm. I’ll then walk you through the use of the algorithm with a few varieties of I/O. Finally, I’ll show you some benchmarks and go over the history of this well-known compression algorithm.

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In a previous post I showed you how we use DNS Service Discovery in a product I work on for Cisco Systems. That project uses the Avahi browser, which does not have a Windows port. In this article, I’ll show you how to perform service discovery on Windows using Apple’s Bonjour SDK for Windows.

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For most of this year I’ve been working on a new product called Cisco OnPlus, a network management service for small business. In order to do its job effectively, OnPlus needs to know what devices are present on the network, and one of the key tools we use to accomplish this is DNS Service Discovery. [...]

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The container classes included in the C++ standard library serve as good illustrations of both the strengths and the weaknesses of the language. The strengths are obvious: efficient, type-safe containers with performance guarantees suitable for a huge variety of applications. And the weaknesses? Compiler error messages that redefine the term useless, and documentation that makes [...]

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One of the great things about C, and even more so for C++, is its strong type checking mechanisms. In general a lot of bugs are caught at compile time, and experienced programmers are able to recognize and fix these types of errors quickly. Unfortunately, there are plenty of places in any C program where [...]

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In my last post I showed a particularly easy way to to set up an SMTP server so postfix could send mail from your Linux system. In this post I’m going to add a few tips that might help you get through some rough spots in the whole process.

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Getting a new computer can be interesting. My recent purchase of a Dell XPS notebook came with a few problems that I didn’t anticipate, including: The video hardware is not properly supported under Linux – my fault for not checking up on this. The backlit keyboard is an ergonomic catastrophe. When viewed under bright light, [...]

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For most of the thirty-some years that I’ve been paid to program, I’ve worked with Assembly language, C, or C++. There have been some diversions to Java, which is pretty painless for a C++ programmer, and always the odd short job or two in anything from Perl to Haskell. But for the last three months [...]

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Back in the day the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was all the rage in the study of linguistics. With apologies to those who actually work in the field, I’ll crudely summarize it as the idea that the language you speak both constrains and influences how you think. The idea says that if your language only has one [...]

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