Bring It On

If you haven't lived in a cave for the last few months, you've probably noticed that Microsoft has recently updated it's C++ compiler with the release of Visual Studio .NET 2003 (don't you just love MS product naming). This was a major upgrade of the compiler and has dramatically improved standard compliance. Having several million lines of code to play with (of which few million are compiled on non-Windows platforms using gcc), and after 6+ months of usage (since first public beta) I can't say I am not satisfied with it, but there are still a lot of small quirks to resolve. This is natural because the span between last two versions has been too big - previous version was issued in 1998(!) with Visual Studio 6. That means that in the meantime there was no real massive code base to test compiler with, while all along gcc was slowly upgraded will zillions of people using (testing) it every day. Handling boost and loki is just not good enough measure - in our real-life usage scenario of both libraries and other code using them (not only libraries' regression tests) I've seen several instances where compiler got confused just by changing the order of included files (especially from boost). I've also found at least one easy to reproduce bug that produces ICE yet is very simple (far more complicated code compiles without a glitch). Good news is that all problems I've seen can be worked around in a relative simple way, so switch is a must for users of version 6 and .NET (a.k.a 2002). One more bizarre fact - by default, compiler does not impose strict standard conformance. If you however do turn it on fully (/Za), you'll get zillions of errors in MFC and other MS code!

I'm late - everyone blogs nowadays. But then there is a question on where to host and what tool to use to produce it? Buying domain name was easy, and I already had quite a lot of personal web space to spare. But my personal web space can not contain any kind of active content, just plain old (x)html. So, all of the easy to use blogging tools that rely on active technologies like php or asp (some even require database backend) were out of the question. What's left? Why, good old do-it-youself. Start with the xml schema for the content (this will make editing really easy in a good xml editor), generate xhtml using simple xslt, do the same for rss feed and style your pages with css. Very few files, easy to (re)generate whole site if necessary (with possibly different structure and/or look and feel), easy to backup, easy to maintain. Of course, wife pleasing factor was very low, since I wasted several evenings making the damn thing ;) I'm pleased with the result, though - site works and looks good on all browsers I could try it on (IE, Mozilla Firebird, Opera) which shouldn't come as a surprise considering I've made substantial effort to be standards conformant.