http://blogs.embarcadero.com/eboling Thu, 15 Mar 2012 20:39:09 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en-US So I almost got burned by a function.  Partly my fault, because I didn't read the online documentation on it.  I looked at the API in the header file, and it had very limited documentation, but mostly enough for me to figure out it.  I also happened to be looking ... http://blogs.embarcadero.com/eboling/2012/03/15/5696 The title of posts like this is intended to indicate events that were pretty painful, and where the fault was all mine. So, shortening up the damage chain, on IA-32, if you do this: FSTP [some location] ... FILD [some location] and the FPU stack was empty at the FSTP, you'll die on the FILD ... http://blogs.embarcadero.com/eboling/2011/03/05/5693 This is a little bit of a dead horse beating, but it's still relevant, so what the heck, why not.  RAM is extremely important to me as a developer for the obvious reasons, so every once in a while, I look around at my processes, and see who's being an ... http://blogs.embarcadero.com/eboling/2011/02/24/5690 Yesterday I finally switched from a Cisco add-on VPN to the built-in VPN support in Snow Leopard.  The built in stuff is much nicer.  Easy to use, performant.  I had, however, a little hitch along the way. I have a Windows VM running on the Mac on which I do all ... http://blogs.embarcadero.com/eboling/2011/02/11/5677 So, I'm sitting in the Denver airport, on my way to Massachusetts, on a longer layover.  I went to some crappy sports bar, and they had some very unpleasant food, and so I found a cantina upstairs that I thought might be able to wash away the sports bar.  Corn ... http://blogs.embarcadero.com/eboling/2010/10/23/5671 I love my Mac.  I hate the CD drive in my Mac.  I've hated all the CD drives in the Macs for a while.  What I can't stand about them is the lack of a physical manual eject capability.  Others have had this complaint.  I don't know why Apple did ... http://blogs.embarcadero.com/eboling/2010/02/19/5668 Introduction Dynamic linking has been available on most operating systems for a long long time now.  It is interesting, however, to peer into the origins and resulting behavior of some aspects of symbol binding on various systems.  You might be surprised by the results. To focus this discussion, what I'm talking about ... http://blogs.embarcadero.com/eboling/2010/02/16/5656 I was part of the team that was passed through the Kylix threshing machine originally, so I decided to do a little research into shared library initialization and termination early on.  Some very difficult to debug things can happen to you if you get surprised by library load/unload sequencing on ... http://blogs.embarcadero.com/eboling/2010/01/29/5639 Purists and pragmatists will argue over the feature of converting hardware level exceptions into RTL exceptions.  This is the feature where you catch, for example, a memory access violation and keep running your application. Purists will say you should never do that, because you could wind up doing serious damage ... http://blogs.embarcadero.com/eboling/2009/11/10/5628 I could write a lot about OS X malloc.  Other people already have, and maybe I'll write some more about it at a later date.  I just wanted to point out a couple of things to make people think a little. The default allocator you get when you call malloc has ... http://blogs.embarcadero.com/eboling/2009/10/29/5626