Adding libcurl to Xcode’s linker settings

by ranjith on April 5, 2009

I forget this every now and then and spend next 20 minutes searching when ever I want to add an external library to the XCode’s project linker settings. In VS2005 its just adding Additional Dependencies in Linker -> Inputs in Project Properties

For eg, Let say i want to add libcurl, openssl, libcrypto and zlib to the path. Go to Project -> Edit Project -> Linking -> Other Linker Flags


-L/usr/lib -lcurl -lssl -lcrypto -lz

Note: libcurl, libxml2 are included with the XCode’s developer libs, so think again before you set out to compile the source for libcurl to generate the libs.

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Best English Software Blogs by Malayalis

by ranjith on April 4, 2009

Krishna Kumar took extreme pain to parse through a list of approximately 1000 or so blog lists to come up with a top 10 english programming blogs by malayalis. Guess, what; I am in the list. I am honored, at the same time felt bit embarrassed. I had never been faithful to this blog apart from the wild claim I make in the masthead. Anyway thanks krishna.

Best English Software Blogs by Malayalis: ” but I spent a few hours going through every single blog in the Kerala Blog Roll maintained by Manoj Prabhakaran, Asst. Professor at the University of Illinois. Out of those, I looked at those public blogs related to software or technology written in English and updated in the last three months. I then selected the top 10 of them based on their content and design.”

(Via Thought Clusters.)

As you said, Kishan Thomas of Hackoramas really deserves special mentioning. He started this way before when rest of us haven’t even heard about blogging. Infact, I got inspired after him. Well, IMHO he is the one who started the concept of micro blogging, way before the twitter fad. He called it as a micro bilog; pretty close ha?

One other guy who was in the front seat was V.S Babu. He stopped after he moved back to India.

Both Kishan and Babu stopped when they had their first borns. Well, I started when I had my son :-)

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Arms Dog Millionaire

by ranjith on March 11, 2009

Let’s say you’re a defense-company marketing executive. And you want to make a splash at the Indian defense ministry’s annual air show. Do you: (a) buy expensive gifts for New Delhi’s generals; (b) treat the press to Kingfishers and samosas; (c) produce a Bollywood-esque video featuring bare-midriff girls, flower-draped missiles, and the catch phrase ‘dinga dinga dee?’

Iron Eagle Nominee: Israeli Armsdog-Millionaires Assault Bollywood, Good Taste | Danger Room from Wired.com: “

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Start up speed of Java – A Joke !

by ranjith on March 5, 2009

This is really funny.

How accurate are the technical arguments in JWZ’s ten-year-old “java sucks” article with today’s Java? : programming:

Person A: Knock Knock

Person B: Who’s there?

.

.

.

.

Person A: Java”

(Via .)evan_tech

Hopefully its not as bad as before .

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TV Lost ?

by ranjith on March 4, 2009

How true. Computers won. The so called TV is now a big flat screen monitor.

Why TV Lost: “About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they’d produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers. It’s clear now that even by using the word ‘convergence’ we were giving TV too much credit. This won’t be convergence so much as replacement. People may still watch things they call ‘TV shows,’ but they’ll watch them mostly on computers.”

(Via Paul Graham.)

IMHO computers have won long time back, even before the onset of flat screen TVs and streaming videos. The set-top box is a computer for all practical purpose; its just that the transport through which the media is delivered is not TCP/IP.

May be the TV networks hoped they could build a parallel network like internet just for TV and get you hooked on to that. However thank god, it didn’t happened.

Speaking of which the new Mac Mini looks compelling. It would suite the HTPC that I am longing for.

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Git vs CVS

by ranjith on March 3, 2009

When I watched this Linus Torvald’s presentation on Git, I even thought my whole life is worthless. Linus even called SVN the most pointless project ever started.

Well, until Eric Sink stepped forward and explained everything in a more rational way. Here it is, please read the first part of a series of articles Eric is brewing right now.

DVCS and DAGs, Part 1: “Traditional tools (like Subversion and Vault) tend to model history as a Line.  In the DVCS tools (like Git and Mercurial), history is a DAG.  The differences between these two models are rather interesting.”

(Via Eric.Weblog().)

Git sure is a tool for programmers. It makes a programmers life easier. However, the release engineer; poor guy, needs to bend backwards until his head is aligned tangentially to his mighty ass.

Multithreading in C++0x

by ranjith on March 2, 2009

Multithreading in standard C++ is a long awaited feature. There was a draft already up in 2008. I just found this three part tutorial on justtsoftwaresolutions blog.

Multithreading in C++0x part 1: Starting Threads | Just Software Solutions – Custom Software Development and Website Development in West Cornwall, UK: “Concurrency and multithreading is all about running multiple pieces of code in parallel. If you have the hardware for it in the form of a nice shiny multi-core CPU or a multi-processor system then this code can run truly in parallel, otherwise it is interleaved by the operating system — a bit of one task, then a bit of another. This is all very well, but somehow you have to specify what code to run on all these threads.”

(Via .)

This is a killer, portable code is now not a dream anymore. And gone are days defining functions in global space or statics to start a thread.

There are some real gems in the list. I hope I can finish reading this some time. The problems with academic papers are its plain boring. Click on the via link to head on to the hackernews. I found some of the stuff in the comments real intresting

10 Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice): “Here’s the original list. It’s a rather personal list of foundational papers and papers with deep ideas. I wrote it ‘off the cuff’ and threw it into a tumblr blog the other day and I got responses from people who suggested others. I’ll add those in a later blog.”

(Via .)

How does Mentoring work ?

by ranjith on January 27, 2009

A carpenter goes through an apprenticeship under an experienced carpenter before he actually cut his first 2×4. A physician goes through a rigorous Residency program before she starts her own practice. A scientist does a fellowship and often a post doctoral fellowship before he goes inventing all by himself. Lawyers do work for a senior before he starts his own law firm or being offered a partnership. IMHO programmers are the only group, who will start right on their job.

Jeremy writes about his experience here

Mentoring Other Developers – Jeremy D. Miller — The Shade Tree Developer: “We constantly gnash our teeth over how our industry just isn’t ‘mature.’  We propose certifications and guilds and brown bags and whatnot.  Maybe all we really need to do to start is just help each other out with bare bone basics first. ”

IMHO a green horn should be put into a maintenance project, may be multiple ones, his first year. Sorry for being cruel, but it helps.

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Switch is new GOTO ?

by ranjith on January 26, 2009

Over the years I have met people who despise switch statements. Personally I don’t hate it religiously as much as some of my fellow programmers do. But as you can imagine, some of the things that your peers won’t like might rub into you with years of interaction. So I started disliking it without knowing why.

Sure, Chris Brandsma explains it why.

Refactoring a Switch statement: “First off, switch statements are very static.  To add a new item to statement you have to recompile.  There are times when you would like the list to be a bit more dynamic.  Maybe you would like the list to be loaded via an IoC library. ”

(Via Elegant Code.)

I wonder if switch actually has a performance degradation. I doubt, it has. But is there any benchmarks available online ?

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