Coding Relic

Nowadays I make a habit of writing up how to use particular tools or techniques for anything which might be useful to reference later. Many...

I recently had to work on functionality to look through /proc/<pid> for information about processes, which would have entailed an anno...

I always mess up the initialization of plain old data fields in C++. Always. Maybe by writing it up, I'll finally get it right. Plain...

In 2010 both Ian Lance Taylor and Dave Miller wrote about STT_GNU_IFUNC, an ELF symbol type supported by the GNU compiler and linker. Thes...

libarchive is a library to handle tar, zip, cpio, pax, and many other archive formats . It uses a "walk through the archive" prog...

Content management systems like Django typically do not embed HTML strings directly in code. They separate the presentation of the data out...

A few months ago I posted a description of how to use SIOCGIFCONF to retrieve information about interfaces. SIOCGIFCONF is somewhat clunky...

A system which stays up for weeks or months at a time needs to monitor various facets of its operation to alert an operator if something unu...

One of gcc's more obscure features is -finstrument-functions. It was implemented by Cygnus Solutions , presumably as part of a contract ...

D_NOTIFY is a facility in the Linux 2.4 kernel to monitor a directory for changes. It will send the monitoring application a signal when fil...

After many years of working in plain C, I'm back to writing C++. I feel like an unfrozen caveman, confused by the flashing lights of the...

hash_map is not part of the current C++ STL, but is universally adopted as an extension. Using hash_map is simple when using built-in primit...

A little while ago in this space we discussed SO_BINDTODEVICE , the socket option to control which physical interface will be used for packe...

There have been issues with the autofocus on the Motorola Droid phone, which suddenly resolved themselves this morning and led to speculati...

In a system with multiple network interfaces, can you constrain a packet to go out one specific interface? If you answered "bind() the ...

Western Digital recently corrected a firmware issue in certain models of VelociRaptor where the drive would erroneously report an error to ...

When one has a core file, one runs gdb. Its simply the way things were Meant To Be, right? Yet gdb isn't the right tool for the job in a...

A backtrace is often the first step in debugging a problem. Generating a backtrace is generally thought of as a function of the debugger, on...

The Principle of the Conservation of Software Quality postulates that for every best practice there is an equal and opposite worst practic...

Has this ever happened to you? You allocate some sort of resource which needs to be released before returning from the function. You can put...