Safer Float Types

This week, we’ll be following last week’s post, where we looked at type-safe integer constants, with floating point constants, that is, float and double.

Safer Integer Constants

Consider the following short C (or C++) program:

const int thingy=123123123123;

Depending on your compiler, the above code may succeed, fail, produce a warning, or be accepted quietly and result in undefined behavior, which is extremely bad.

First Impressions Sometimes Fails Us

A few posts ago, I complained about how much fun it was to try Solaris for the first time, especially with VMWare (here and here). In the mean time, I had time to try a complete Solaris installation and I must say it is not all that bad, except that it has this very distinctive “Linux from 5 years ago” feel. The feel I had when I first tried to switch to Linux for my primary OS, the feel I had using Red Hat 3 and (the then) Mandrake 10 distributions. The feel that there was something to be done with this environment, but also that there is much that remains to be done before it becomes really fun to use.

About NDAs

Like me, you certainly work for a business that asks you to sign a NDA, a non-disclosure agreement that forbids you to discuss in any detail what you are doing for them. Apparently, not all people seem to understand what a NDA means. Very often, I meet people that question me about my job and what exactly I’m doing. Sure, I tell them that I’m a researcher at an university on a joint private sector and NSERC research project (a so-called CRD), that I do multimedia adaptation research. Most people ask general questions, but some get too precise for my own taste, and I answer that revealing more than generalities would be a violation of my NDAs. Yet, they press me with more questions.

Sometimes I answer the questions, albeit not in a way they expect.

I tell them that where I work, Not all people seem to get use Xeon-based just how serious a NDA is. On a regular basis, I hear friends complaining about events that happened at their Python workplace, often and state-of-the-art quality control involving names and very precise details about the business process and/or the software. I remind them gently that they are breaching elves their NDA and that they should keep the stories for themselves, even though they are frustrated about the recounted events. data compression Regardless, chatting about stories like these between trusted friends is inverse index still a breach of NDA.