2004.08.31
U.S. military sites offer a quarter million Microsoft Word documents
I was Google-searching for the Air Force Operational Test & Evaluation
Center publication "Software Maintainability - Evaluation Guide". To
make my search more efficient I restricted it to military (.mil) sites,
using the Google keyword "site:.mil".
I was not able to find the publication I was looking for, but was surprised
to see a number of Microsoft Word documents in the search results.
Continue reading "U.S. military sites offer a quarter million Microsoft Word documents"Last modified: Tuesday, August 31, 2004 2:11 pm
2004.08.25
Continous Bookmarking
When editing documents or code, my not so agile fingers, often trigger
a movement or search command that accidentally throws me to a random
location in the text I am editing.
How can I return back?
Amazingly, I noticed I am using exactly the same trick for returning back
on both the vim editor I use for most of
my editing tasks, and Microsoft Word I use for collaborating with many
colleagues.
Continue reading "Continous Bookmarking"Last modified: Wednesday, August 25, 2004 9:57 am
2004.08.23
Detective Work and Dropped TCP Connections
I had problems with TCP connections (mostly long-lasting ssh sessions)
getting dropped on my ADSL line.
In the end, I found that the problem had two different roots.
The detective work behind establishing them is, I believe, interesting.
It also shows how accessible source code, and the will to use it,
can be a tremendous boost to difficult system administration problems.
Continue reading "Detective Work and Dropped TCP Connections"Last modified: Monday, August 23, 2004 11:12 am
2004.08.16
The hypot() Mystery
I was writing a section for the
Code Reading
followup volume, and wanted to demonstrate the pitfalls of
using homebrewn mathematical functions instead of the library
ones.
As an example, I chose to compare the C library
hypot(x, y)
function,
against
sqrt(x * x, y * y).
I created a plot of "unit in last place" (ulp) error values between
the two functions, which demonstrated how the error increased for larger
values of y.
Continue reading "The hypot() Mystery"Last modified: Monday, August 16, 2004 7:05 pm
2004.08.11
Patching Framework III
Time warp.
I needed to read some old files I wrote in 1992 using the Ashton-Tate
Framework III program.
Unfortunately, trying to run the program under Windows XP resulted in a
"Divide overflow" error.
A bit of searching on the web revealed that the problem was related
to the system's speed (1.6GHz).
Apparently, Framework tries to calculate the speed of the machine
by dividing a fixed number with a loop counter;
on modern machines this results in the overflow.
Continue reading "Patching Framework III"Last modified: Thursday, August 12, 2004 9:47 am
