{old} Technical Articles

Here's a collection of articles on various computer, programming and other related topics that I've written over the years.  Some were written for publication in major technical journals. Others, for the internal newsletters of the companies for which I've worked.  The rest were written for the Internet, either here, or on newsgroups.  They are listed roughly in order of increasing technical content.  (i.e. Easiest to read first...)

My more recent writings are on my blog : Honest Illusion

• "How To Do Math in Your Head" - A necessary skill, lost on modern society [NT]
• "The New Windows 95" - Discussing the OEM Service Release 2 version of Windows 95 (950B). (First published circa September 1996) [MSKCC]
• "The Pre-History of GUIs"   which tells the story behind the battle between PCs and Macs (and includes Why Steve Jobs is evil) [WEB]
• "Paradigm Shifts, and the Search for Nirvana Code" - Philosophy on the past & future of programming skills. [WEB]
• "The ANSI/ISO C++ Standards Meeting (November 1994)" - Some people go to the shore for their vacations. I went to a conference in Philadelphia. (First published December 1994). [DRTE]
• "The MVP Summit" - Then again, some people spend their days off in conference with the folks at Microsoft. (First published circa March 1995)[DRTE]
• "A Class Dialog Box Units" - My first publication in an actual "news stand" magazine in over a decade!  It was even featured on the cover [WTJ]
• "Creating a Word Iterator" - I followed that one with this, (only 6 months later).  A novel use of STL iterators. [CUJ]
• "Access Raw Data with Performance Counters in Visual C++ ", DevX.com, Aug 2002 (Note, link will take you to the DevX.com website)
• "C Programming Skills" column #1 . - Discussing the use and abuse of memcpy() and strcmp(). (First published circa January 1994).[DRTE]
• "C Programming Skills" column #2 . - Discussing sensible (vs. ineffective) ways of protecting against bad input values. (First published circa March 1994).[DRTE]
• "C Programming Skills" column #3 . - Discussing dealing with string values, and paying attention to what one's code actually does. (First published June 1994).[DRTE]
• "C Programming Skills" column #4 . - Discussing logical and bitwise ANDs. (First published April1994).[DRTE]
• "C Programming Skills" column #5 . - Discussing a total make over of a simple function (Adding commas to a number). (First published October 1994).[DRTE]
• "DnLog Debugging Function" - Discussing the techniques I used in creating a proprietary Dendrite library used in detecting & logging errors. (Concepts presented are usable without the Dendrite code) (First published August 1994). [DRTE]
• "Key Handlers Revisted" - Discussing the benefits of Data Hiding (Encapsulation) in C code. (First published June 1994). [DRTE]
• "Fun with 'do{} while (FALSE)'". (First published circa September 1994).[DRTE]
• "Little Endian vs. Big Endian" - Discussing how different computer store numbers differently. (First published October 1994). [DRTE]

Legend

• [MSKCC] - Originally published in "I/S Notes" - The newsletter of Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center's Information Systems Department.
• [DRTE] - Originally published in "FYI" - The newsletter of Dendrite International's world-wide programming staff.
• [WDJ] - Windows Developer's Journal   A Miller-Freeman, Inc. publication.
• [CUJ] - The C/C++ Users Journal  A Miller-Freeman, Inc. publication.
• [WEB] - Originally appearing somewhere on the Internet: Either a newsgroup, CompuServe forum, or a similar venue.
• [NT] - Written expressly for this Web Site.