Bramz’ warehouse

This post is inspired by a question posed by a colleague some time ago. Consider following C++ code fragment in which B derives from A and declares a fun with a different signature:
#include <iostream>

struct A
{
void fun(int x) { std::cout << “int A\n”; }
};

struct B: A
{
void fun(float x) { std::cout << “float B\n”; }
};

int main()
{
B [...]

This post serves as a bookmark for a little gem I’ve found: How To Write Shared Libraries (pdf) by Ulrich Drepper. It’s a 47 page document on writing shared libraries in a Unix environment.

Today, I will show you a trick that may help you with the heavier string formatting jobs in Python.
Most people using Python know how to format output using string interpolation. It works much like C’s sprintf, except for the funny % operator:

>>> a = “the Knights”
>>> b = “Ni”
>>> “we are %s who say %s” [...]

While looking for some info on 64 bit masm, I stumbled on Agner Fog’s site with five comprehensive manuals on software optimization. Each covers a different topic: optimizations in C/C++ and assembly, microarchitectures, instruction tables and calling conventions.

pyvtuneapi is a very simple extension that binds the VTune API to Python. If you have VTune, and you’re using it to profile a Python driven application, you can use pyvtuneapi to pause and resume the analyzer.

As you could read in my previous post, my devenv.exe stopped working since last Patch Tuesday updates. Since rebooting and even reinstalling the entire VS2005 suite didn’t resolve the problem, I’ve tried the only other approach I could think of apart from reformating my laptop: reverting the windows updates. I made an extra [...]

Today, after a mandatory reboot because of a patch Tuesday windows update, devenv.exe of Visual Studio 2005 no longer wants to start. Well, it tries to start, and sometimes it gives a flash of its main window, but then it dies without a cry.
The first thing one tries to resolve the problem is to [...]

From my previous post, you might know about my recent interest in minidumps to debug remote applications. Since then, I’ve been trying to implement an automatic and unattended crash dump facilitiy in Lass. On the Win32 platform, the key functions are SetUnhandledExceptionFilter in kernel32.lib and MiniDumpWriteDump in dbghelp.lib. The former lets you [...]

Yesterday, I had some fun playing around with remote debugging and examining crash dumps. In the lab, we’re currently running a lot of noise map simulations for a project we’re involved in. These simulations are distributed over all available computers in the lab, a mixture of old and new, often actively used by [...]

pycpuid is a very simple Python extension. It reads the information available from the CPUID assembly instruction, and makes it available to any Python program. I needed it to decide on some codepath based on whether the box supported SSE2. I didn’t found anything alike, so I coded it myself.