I know we all do silly stuff, and what I did today is related to programming(C++). I needed a class where all members were static. No sweat, it worked.

I wanted to reuse some of the code in there and the stupid thing I did was make a derived class from it. It was all working fine, till today when I made another class to derive from it not realizing that all the members in the base class were static. So stupid -- I did not want that.

Having said that it would not be correct to say : Never derive from a class where all data members are static. One shoe does not fit all.

Come December and your top 10 favorite TV channels are showing the Top 10 events of 2007, be it movies, songs, people, etc etc and blah blah too. There is Top 10 everywhere. McAfee recently released a document that predicts the Top 10 computer security threats for the year 2008.

Get the pdf document here.

Of all of them the most interesting is the one which says "Virtual Threat Growth to Outpace Real-World Growth", which I tend to agree more than all other predictions and this one is probably going to hold true for some more number of years. Security software and systems are becoming more mature everyday but most of the time it is a fight between products of the security software vendors and the hackers. Time has come that these products needs to match the needs of the good guys who have more stake (in terms of money, etc) on online virtual objects. My grandfather had the chance to touch, feel and smell every dime he earned but I will never do so to even 50% of my total earnings in my lifetime. There are(and will be) just virtual objects in software. Security needs to be simplified.

And there is another one in the Top 10 list that bought smiles to my face. It says "Windows Vista Joins the Party".

Happy Top 10-ing.//

I am back from my vacation after being off-line and off-blogging for about 2 weeks. I found a few spammers trying to create nuisance on my blog while I was away.

Check out the picture of my air-travel back home.

I am back to programming and here is a simple example of using Boost's thread library to create a thread without you worrying about the syntax of Windows threads or Linux pthreads. All you need is the boost's thread library for your platform installed.

#include <iostream>
#include <boost/thread/thread.hpp>

class MyThread {
public:
	void operator()() {
		std::cout << "A simple example of using boost threads" << std::endl;
		//Write your thread logic here.
	}
};

int main() {

	MyThread myThreadObj;
	boost::thread boostThread(myThreadObj);
	boostThread.join();
	return 0;
}

Book : Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture: Patterns for Concurrent and Networked Objects

Reasonable preview of the book available at the above link for you to decide whether you really need this or not.

To me it looks like the one place documentation that I will refer to when you dont find your colleagues to share your confused state of mind when making a design decision.

Available at Amazon.com at $60. Shipping cost to India = +$9 approx.

Online Tutorial : C++ Multithreading -- Synchronisation Primitives Patterns and Idioms

The author says and I quote, "The purpose of this tutorial is to introduce techniques for safe and efficient concurrent programming. We'll begin by reviewing the basic concepts, and then move on to cover concurrency design patterns."

Rightly said!

The second part of the tutorial is not for the novice programmer, it may not make sense. But if you have done some amount of multi-threaded design and appreciate the challenges it poses, or if you are using Boost libraries and wished that they had better examples to explain, then this is a good resource to read.

Fun Read : Another interesting argument on the forum

Java's Thread.sleep(long milliseconds ) is a completely unreliable and lies worse than even Fox News....Really! Read more.

Happy Reading.//

After reading the next few lines, you may suggest I spend time doing something more constructive, but nevertheless I started my day on my PC trying to find out who owns the Internet. (Its off today on Account of AP Formation Day)

Silly thought? Its interesting though.

www.internet.com

This website lives upto your expectation like the real Internet. Its owned by Jupitermedia Corporation, and provides a lot of useful resources for people who drive IT.

They say it attracts one of the most demographically attractive online communities on the Web: a community that consists of highly educated professionals with buying power, who hold technical, creative or corporate management positions.

You can register yourself and get easy access to IT and Business resources like eBooks, whitepapers, newsletters and webcasts. A pretty useful site -- and it most probably matches the domain name, much unlike the others as you will see below.

www.internet.net

This site is a dissapointment. It looks like its owned by one smart guy (actually an internet brand management company called MarkMonitor) just waiting for some one to pay him millions to buy this domain from him. Its sad that this site was registered in 1997 and there is still no useful stuff in there. Its just holds those usual advertisements of online shopping, dating and blah blah stuff.

www.internet.org

The internet.org is a Wordpress blog, which talks about the trends, progress of the internet and the technologies driving it. They call it THE LONG WAVE. But the blogs are posted very infrequently. The last entry is dated June 1 2007. A little dissapointment that the internet organization is not living upto the pace at which internet is evolving.



Happy Internetting.//