TURBU Tech

I’ve been working with Eric Grange on adding a new feature to the DWS compiler recently: external routines.  The goal of this feature is to allow DWS code to call into native routines like Delphi code can call into routines in a DLL by writing a function signature and marking it external, without having to use a TdwsUnit component and create a bunch of heavy-overhead binding code. Continue reading ‘External routines in DWS’ »

What do a bed and a burger have in common?  Not much, at first glance.  You eat a burger and sleep in a bed, and certainly not the other way around.  (You might eat a burger while in bed, if you’re a slob, though.)  But they seem like two completely different products, because they are.

So, let’s be a bit more specific.  What do a bed and a burger have in common economically?

Aha! Now we’re getting somewhere.  That’s obvious: they’re both near-ubiquitous consumer goods.  Produced on a different scale, certainly–you’ll probably go through hundreds or even thousands of burgers between buying one bed and buying your next one–but (in the US at least) you’re almost certainly going to buy both during your life.

Oh, and one other interesting point: they both have to be made to order, because they will go bad if you leave them sitting out for too long. Continue reading ‘Beds and burgers’ »

You know what’s even worse than a race condition between two threads in your code?

A race condition in one thread in your code, because there are good solutions and debugging techniques for tracking down multi-threading conflicts, but they don’t work when there’s only one thread involved.

That’s right.  I just spent the last few hours tracking down what turned out to be a reentrancy problem. Continue reading ‘The case of the one-thread race condition’ »

So apparently I got hacked somehow. Not sure what happened, but someone found a way in to my WordPress installation and started using it to serve spammy ad links.  I’ve rooted out the problem and installed a WP security plugin that will watch for and work to prevent future attacks, so hopefully this won’t happen again.

As a minor note, anyone who’s left comments on here, someone might know your email address now.  Aside from that, this shouldn’t cause any problems for my readers.

A lot’s happened in my life over the last few weeks, but most of it revolves around one basic fact: I quit my job at WideOrbit to take a new one with De Novo Software.  The project I’m working on now is a program for flow cytometry, a type of analysis of medical sample data used in diagnoses and research.  (In Delphi, of course.)  It looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun to work on. Continue reading ‘New Year, new job, new town, same me’ »