C++ Portability Sucks

C++ is one of the most ported languages, but writing an application across differing platforms apparently isn't so pretty. I stumbled upon this while trying to figure out why gcc is putting my template class' constructors in the .data segment of my executable file instead of the .text segment. I hate real-time by the way. So much frustration for things I really don't care for at all. I think I might drop this course.

Anyway, so that mozilla portability guide is quite a read. And the HP-UX compiler really sucks.

I Made This

Sony Media Software recently released Photo Go, an application for organizing your photos. You can correct the colour in your photos, remove red eye, straighten photos, apply effects, etc. You can order prints from ImageStation, you can email photos, you can export photos to removeable devices, import photos from your cameras and other devices, etc.

BUT! What's more important than all that is that I made this product. Me. Its my baby. This app was completed on a really tight schedule. It was started by me and the other co-op back in the Winter term. I did research on how to handle the data management, and implemented the prototype back end architecture. The other co-op, Richard, worked on the photo list UI control. By the end of our term we had an app that could scan for photos in folders that you selected and it would show them in the list, with animation and (mostly) invisible caching of the thumbnails. It was rough, but it got transformed into a useful product over the few months after I left to go back to school. When I came back to Sony this term, the team finished up last minute bug fixes in the first couple of weeks (I didn't work on it) and it went gold shortly after. Exciting times. Certainly exciting to see a product you worked on go from scratch to finish.

Very cool. You can even download a demo from the website if you'd care to try it out.

Power of the Lead Developer

I was going through some shared library code here at Sony Media Software, looking for some string functions that I had seen before. As I was looking I came across some code that filled me with a giddy sense of wile. Our top of the engineering chain, the lead of leads, a guy named Curt, has special code sprinkled all throughout our code base. Stuff that protects us from shooting ourselves in the foot, months or years after having pulled the trigger, so to speak. Kinda like child safety mechanisms.

Anyway, the particular code that made me smile was this:

#if defined(CURT_NO_MERCY)
// a whole slew of deprecations of standard
// library functions such as strcpy
#endif

No mercy indeed. Oh the power.