Salvatore Iovene

Win32 odyssey: who needs documentation?

Salvatore Iovene — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 07:59:46 +0000

During my coding adventures, I have just found myself having to port an existing Win32 application to CMake. After writing a mere 283 lines CMakeLists.txt file, and getting the application successfully compile, I fired it up to see if it worked, of course. I found it failing when doing a WSAAsyncSelect, and failing there didn’t [...]

Leaving closed protocols behind

Salvatore Iovene — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 08:52:55 +0000

In order to fulfill what has been a proposition of mine for quite a long time, as of December the 1st 2007, I will no longer use any Instant Messaging services based on a closed protocol, e.g. MSN, ICQ, AIM or Yahoo. The only way you will be able to contact me (besides conventional methods [...]

Fujitsu-Siemens shame on you

Salvatore Iovene — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 12:15:44 +0000

I found myself in the process of realizing a dual-boot system on a laptop, with Windows XP and Ubuntu 7.10. After wiping out the content of the disk and partitioning it appropriately, I proceed to the installation of Windows XP (knowing that I needed to install it first, since it would overwrite the MBR and [...]

Who wants to talk about patent infringement?

Salvatore Iovene — Tue, 15 May 2007 13:00:58 +0000

After all the dust raised again by Microsoft about Linux and the Open Source community allegedly committing patent infringements (235 this time, they were 228 in 2004), I really feel the need to spend a few words about the matter, or then, a few images. It looks like the jealous Redmond’s zealots, avidly fighting to protect [...]

TABs vs Spaces. The end of the debate.

Salvatore Iovene — Mon, 14 May 2007 12:21:33 +0000

When writing source code, indenting is very important. Having a neat and clean programming style, let alone a precise and uniform one, is probably one of the most important keys when attaching example source code with a job application. I was myself asked to show some of my source code in my last two interviews. [...]

How to improve the quality of programmers

Salvatore Iovene — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 20:25:05 +0000

After claiming that most programmers just can’t program, and actually addressing most of the problems to the lack of passion of people who decide to start a career as a programmer, I would also like to express my point of view on a tightly related subject: what can be done to improve the situation? The [...]

Why most programmers are lousy

Salvatore Iovene — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 12:10:23 +0000

I’ve been in the IT field long enough to get to know many programmers, both experienced and just wannabies. During this time, I’ve realized that most of them are just bad programmers, simply said. I find myself agreeing with a brilliant post by Jeff Atwood, which alleges that programmers can’t program. What are the reasons [...]

The ultimate guide for UTF-8 in irssi and GNU/Screen

Salvatore Iovene — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 19:03:15 +0000

I’ve been having quite a lot of trouble, lately, configuring irssi to work well with UTF-8. Irssi’s documentation was quite incomplete, on the matter, or discouraging, and there wasn’t much on the Internet, so, after figuring out what the way is, I’ll share it here. First of all, you’ve got to make sure that your system [...]

Useless fuss about ZIP and RAR

Salvatore Iovene — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 23:46:01 +0000

There has been some fuss generated by Jeff Atwood (who is a Windows developer, which is bad, and a Visual Basic one, which is worse), who seems, in my humble opinion, to be giving partial information around, as closed in his Windows-only world as he appears to be. In a recent article of his, Jeff [...]

Architecture of patching semantic versus logical content

Salvatore Iovene — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 13:44:55 +0000

Inspired by a certain patch that hit a darcs repository to which I concur, I would like to talk about one thing that developers don’t seem to get very often, when using revision control systems: the structure of your files in the repository should have nothing to do with the logical units that make your [...]