zacharyc

UCA College Nationals were this past weekend. I can’t remember if this is the third or the fourth year that I’ve been out, but its been a long time and I miss it. I still like to check in after the competition to see how my old team did. This year the routine looked awesome. I caught a couple of little mistakes, but the team finished 7, which is a very strong showing. Stronger than I can remember in recent history. Congrats to all the competing teams! Like a always say, I hope to see it in person next year! ...

The Standard Template Library in C++ is nice to provide us with a bunch of different container classes so we don’t have to re-invent the wheel every time we write new code. One of the classes is called “Vector”, if you aren’t familiar with it, you might not get too much out of this post. But basically, it is a dynamically growing array. Meaning it has contiguous memory and can be indexed like a regular array. It’s a great class and I use it all over the place, but for the second time in one week I find it lacking. ...

On December 31st, all 30GB Zune users woke up to their music players not working. In a rarity for Microsoft problems, the source for for the problem was found. There is a good explanation of the problem here. There are two lessons to be learned from this: 1) be careful of your looping conditions. 2) Try and write your code in small snippets that are testable, and write tests! A simple iteration through the total amount of days including a leap year would have caught this bug. ...