http://bakins-bits.com Programming issues explained Tue, 14 Apr 2009 02:29:40 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Long time no update this blog.  I intend to fix that.  But for now, I'd like to point to two articles I posted at CodeProject: Tracing Events Raised by Any C# Object—in which I describe a technique for tracing the events of any C# object using a very simple helper class, ... http://bakins-bits.com/archives/13 You can use Word 2007 features to generate very nice looking mathematical notation. This feature is, for all practical purposes, completely undocumented by Microsoft. However, some information has been published by Microsoft employees and others on the web. This post is meant to serve as a convenient directory of that ... http://bakins-bits.com/archives/9 In a series of posts, of which this is the first, I'm going to describe race condition detection and why it is useful to detect data races when you're trying to debug multithreaded programs. But before I get started, here is a useful paper that characterizes race conditions formally: What Are ... http://bakins-bits.com/archives/8 A bunch of items I ordered arrived today - hard disks to relieve my chronic space shortage, and USB 2.0 enclosures to put them in.  I built everything at once and commenced transferring data.  It didn't take long before I remembered Jim Gray's early warnings that as we moved to ... http://bakins-bits.com/archives/7 I was configuring a new computer to be used for testing concurrent software, and was using my standard self-guidelines: second-fastest processor available (a nod to economy), as much DRAM as I can jam on a motherboard, and the latest dual-graphics card technology. Whohoo! But then I found this site on ... http://bakins-bits.com/archives/6 The typical data structures most programmers know and use require imperative programming: they fundamentally depend on replacing the values of fields with assignment statements, especially pointer fields.  A particular data structure represents the state of something at that particular moment in time, and that moment only.  If you want to ... http://bakins-bits.com/archives/4 I—David Bakin—am an experienced software developer with over 25 years experience developing system and application software. My aim with Bakin's Bits is to produce programming tools to help software developers write better programs, and enjoy writing them more. The initial tools I am working on will help diagnose and debug concurrency ... http://bakins-bits.com/archives/1