Found this great article on iterating through containers in C++. It covers the much maligned for-each loop as well as non-standard container iteration. The article also gives some best practice advice on iterating in C++.
Month: July 2005
The Reunion
This weekend was my 10 year high school class reunion. Actually it was not my class reunion, I graduated from Little Rock Catholic High School (CHS), but it was the reunion for what would have been my high school class (Rogers High, aka RHS) had I not moved to Little Rock. I missed the reunion for CHS because they had it the same weekend as my wife’s due date. The weekend as a whole was pretty amazing. We stayed at my daughters God Parents house (probably the most wonderful people I know) and Heather and I became God Parents to two very sweat (and stunningly beautiful) little girls. The reunion get-together consisted of a family night on Friday and an adults semi-formal social on Saturday. I went to both events and the after parties.
Many of the friends I had at RHS I still keep in contact with; while my very closest friends I see fairly regularly as they have remained my best friends. It was nice to visit with everyone, especially those that I had not actually seen in many years. But what struck me most about the reunion was change in social interactions between what had previously been warring parties. No one held over any grudges, no one cared which “group” you belonged too. With only a few notable exceptions, everybody had grown up. I was honestly excited to see everyone and they all seemed glad that I was there. A school, its students, and its faculty can be evaluated by the quality of its graduates. By that standard it looks like the Rogers High School Class of 1995 has reflected well.
I will post pictures when I get them. A special thanks needs to go out to Molly and Fairy forthe best class reunions I have ever seen; Susan and Pete for their gracious hospitality to me and my family; and Marie and James for the honor of being God parents to their girls. All around, it was one of the nicest weekends I had in a while.
SVN Hooks and App Management
One of the very first technology web-sites I ever frequented was ArsTechnica. It occupies a place in the pantheon of Web Tech sites with the likes of Tom’s Hardware and groups.google.com. Found a great summary article on Ars titled Automating deployment with Subversion which has come in handy. My work software deployment system works in a fairly similar way.
HOWTO: unsermake
unsermake is a replacement build tool for KDE. Some of unsermakes advanced features are multi system compile support, simplified makefile syntax (using KDE’s custom Makefile.am files), build progress indicators, full Qt moc file support, cleaner build output and much faster build times.
Modernizing with QT
There are a number of Linux application available using the outdated Motif framework. This legacy Unix framework provides a functional, if archaic, GUI environment that many applications used in the early days of Linux. Some of these applications are still useful, but because of Motif, lack modern GUI functionality and advanced programming paradigms. Trolltech has created a solution for those looking to update their GUI application interface while retaining old Motif application functionality in a Qt Extemsion called QMotif.
Quick Boot
Want to boot your Linux box in under 25 seconds? Well, so do I. A desktop focus Linux distribution would do well to take some of these speed-ups to heart.
Kontact Tip #1
Here is an interesting tip for using Kontact, the KDE groupware/pim client (ala Outlook 2003.) If can turn an email message into a TODO by dragging the message too the “To-do List” icon. Props to Rempt for the tip.
Web with Style
XHTML and CSS have made the web a much prettier place to visit. Yet, there has always been an area of web development to eluded styling. Radio and check boxes are hard to style (don’t get me started on IE’s CSS support) and amazingly difficult to make revert back to sensible defaults (when no Javascript or CSS is available.) Someone has finally accomplished this in a fairly manageable manor. He technique is not intuitive, if it were it would have been done along time ago, but the vast majority of the work is pushed to an outside Javascript file; making it easy to implement.
Leadership: A Review
I got the pleasure of seeing Rudolph Giuliani speak at a graduation ceremony at the University of Oklahoma where he discussed his new book, “Leadership”. He was an amazing speaker and as such I decided to pick up his book when I got the chance. Leadership by Rudolph W. Giuliani and Ken Kurson gives an overview of Mayor Giuliani’s leadership focus and a narrative of his actions/reactions to the September 11th events. I found both aspects of the book fascinating and informative without being overly scholastic.
“Leadership” does NOT provide any staggering new insight into leadership techniques and as such will probably not be useful to students of management. What the book does do is to provide fascinating examples of select leadership traits in action. These “inside” stories were the most enjoyable part of the book. Providing a counterpoint, to the New York media, on Giuliani’s term as mayor.
The book was begun well before 9/11 and as such the material covering those events feels, at times, disconnected from the main theme of the book. But because the 9/11 events play such a huge role in bringing Giuliani’s leadership skills to our attention, the information is understandable and interesting for its own sake.
Overall I really enjoyed reading “Leadership.” Its a quick read with a great deal of information, and was well worth my time.
On Democracy
Liberty is not license.
–Mike Rockers
Even if we want it to be.