First, a confession - I actually occasionally call myself a coder, but in a tongue in cheek, post-modern and ironic way. Heck, it does make for a good blog title and license plate.

Nevertheless, with all the recent “coding schools” cropping up all over the place - at least if you are in the Bay Area - it does seem that being able to code in the context of a reasonably sought after web technology without much further formal training is the path to new, fulfilling careers and of course untold riches in an economy where recent graduates in all fields have problems finding work. Well, at least a career that allows you to rent a room instead of crashing on somebody’s couch.

Like pretty much every other programmer with a Mac, I’m currently looking at Swift. Will I write anything but toy programs in it? I don’t know yet - I don’t really write any Mac-ish software on my Mac,  just unix-ish programs. If Swift doesn’t escape the OS X and iOS ecosystems it’ll be a nice exercise in a neat language that’s not really that relevant to the world at large, or at least to my part of the world at large. Not that this sort of vendor lock-in can’t work well - Visual Basic 6, anybody?

For those of us who remember when the BBC Micro was the home computer with the fastest Basic implementation available, a long time ago, and was pretty legendary in home computing circles in Europe. It didn’t sell that much outside of the UK, mostly because of its price. It was also the target system for the original implementation of Elite. Matt Godbolt is building an emulator in JavaScript. First post of his series can be found here.

When it comes to Emacs, I am an amateur at best, but part of the fun is that I keep discovering new useful functionality.

Thanks to a post over at Mastering Emacs, I’m now aware of ielm, which provides an elisp repl. It came in very handy when I was trying to build an elisp function that would automatically pull all the packages I regularly use via ELPA if they weren’t installed already.

It’s one of those days, thanks to a hard disk going south I ended up having to rebuild the system drive on one of my machines. After putting the important software back on there - “Outlook and Emacs”, as one of my colleagues calls it - I had to reapply some of the usual tweaks that make a generic developer workstation my developer workstation.

One of the changes I wanted to make was to have an “Edit in Emacs” type context menu in Windows Explorer. The only reason I was keeping another editor around was because it’s a feature I use regularly but hadn’t got around to setting up for Emacs.

Admittedly I’m  not the biggest fan of git - I prefer Mercurial - but we’re using it at work and it does a good job as a DVCS. However, we’re mostly a Windows shop and the out of the box performance of Git for Windows is anything but stellar when you are using ssh as the transport for git. That’s not too much bother with most of our repos but we have a couple of fairly big ones and clone performance with those matters.

I used to use Carbon Emacs on OS X for quite a while, but with the release of Emacs 24 I switched to the stock GNU Emacs distribution. While GNU Emacs works fine on OS X, once you throw a German keyboard layout in the mix it doesn’t work so well as OS X uses Option + Number keys for a variety of characters needed for programming like [] and {}. GNU Emacs uses Option as Meta out of the box so the key mapping doesn’t work overly well, especially if you do a lot of programming in the C family of languages.

I recently came across a discussion on LinkedIn where someone had run into memory related undefined behaviour. This prompted me to write this post as it’s a common, subtle and often not very well understood bug that’s easily introduced into C++ code.

Before we start, please keep in mind that what we’re talking about here is undefined behaviour in any standardized version of C++. You’re not guaranteed to see this behaviour in your particular environment and pretty much anything might happen, including your cat hitting the power button on your computer.

Not that I’m doing much with it yet other than the more minibuffer completion, but I really notice when icicles is not installed or inactive, so I’ve ended up adding it to every Emacs installation I use. ELPA is coming in really handy as it’s a matter of just installing icicles via one of its repos rather than having to install it manually. I’m really going off manual installs of complex Emacs packages these days after doing it for so long.

Visual Studio 2013, much like its predecessor Visual Studio 2012, also “features” the SHOUTY uppercase menus. Like in Visual Studio 2012, these can be turned off using a registry setting.

tl;dr - run this command in PowerShell:

Set-ItemProperty -Path HKCU:SoftwareMicrosoftVisualStudio12.0General -Name SuppressUppercaseConversion -Type DWord -Value 1