Nicolás Brailovsky » Meta-post

200th post!

nico — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 10:00:11 +0000

Yes, this is the post number 200 on this blog. Considering we are a month away of starting the fourth year, I guess that gives me quite a lousy periodicity, but I am still surprised I post somewhat regularly here after such a long time (hey, in programmer years that’s like a whole life!).

Since the beginning this blog has mutated from being my public notepad to being a place where I research new topics, or write about things that are generally interesting to me. I lost many readers for posting crazy metaprogramming stuff and for constantly babbling about Vim and Linux, but hey, I’m proud of if. Let’s see what the next 200 posts bring here.

Vacations are over

nico — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 14:03:15 +0000

Long time without updates. I guess I needed vacations from the blog. It was not the first time and it probably won’t be the last one I take, but I’m back now with another truckload of C++ ramblings and misc stuff. Like this one:

Funny queries: What Google thinks of me

nico — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 10:00:48 +0000

It’s been a long time since I used the metapost category. I’ve been taking a look at the queries received by Google for which this blogs shows up. Some of them are quite peculiar, some of them may give us an insight of what the search engine things of me. For example:

Query	Impressions
grumpy old man	2,000
grumpy	400
grumpy man	400
ugly old man	250
grouchy old man	110
grumpy old	35
old grumpy man	70
grumpy gnome	12

There was a long list of variations to these phrases, but I didn’t want such a long post. Anyway, if you thought that grumpy is all Google considers me to be, brace yourself for a surprise:

Query	Impressions
trained monkey	90
no life	90
funny troll
monkey using computer
tool monkey
congratulations monkey
monkey using tools

Basically, a computer using trained-troll monkey, with no life. Pretty accurate, some people may say.

Query	Impressions
señal de muerte	12

Literally signal of death in Spanish. Tip: Lack of pulse.

Another common search:

hang yourself	200
how to hang yourself	90
rope to hang yourself	12

I guess those searches have a very low returning rate.

This is a query which sincerely surprised me:

Query	Impressions
eliphant
eiephant
elehant
elepant
eephant
elephanth

I’ll do a public service here: it’s written ‘elephant’, buddy.

Another downgrade achieved

nico — Mon, 23 May 2011 10:00:41 +0000

From http://i.imgur.com/annBL.jpg

Oh sh….

nico — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 02:29:30 +0000

Template Metaprogramming XVI: Appendix

nico — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 10:00:03 +0000

I forgot but one thing about these posts: the titles. No one got the hint but they are all chapter names from one of my favorites series, Nowhere Man.

Template Metaprogramming XV: Gemini

nico — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 10:00:02 +0000

This is the end. My only reader, the end. After 15 chapters of template metaprogramming you should have learned why staying away from them is a good idea, but if you have been following this series then you should know now when and why they could be useful.

These posts were a compendium of mostly isolated data I found during my travels through the depths of metaprogramming tricks, there are books and people much more capable than me if you want to learn more about this subject (Modern C++ Design by Andrei Alexandrescu comes to mind).

The whole idea of having a cache and a virtual template method was nice, but after seeing the result I decided it was best to have a factory method and an IDL. It may not be so l33t, but whoever has to maintain the code after me will be grateful.

This is the last post on this topic because I feel I have written most, if not everything, I can transmit through this medium but also for an important reason, most likely I won’t be working with C++ code so much from now on [1] so there won’t be as many chances for me to see the dark, insane, side of this beautiful (in its own way) programming language in a programming language. I know most of you must have barely skimmed through these articles, but I still hope you enjoyed them.

[1] That’s right, I’m leaving C++ for the dark side of development, I’ll be working with Java from now on. Keep in mind this article may have been written a long time before it’s published.

[2] Wow, it was a long time since I used the meta-post category

Quote of the week

nico — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 10:00:14 +0000

It seems making a compile fail is actually quite easy. That’s what I have most experience with.

From “Template metaprogramming“, chapter 10 by me

Back for round II

nico — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 00:43:27 +0000

OK, the hiatus is over. It’s not like I’ve been sitting around doing nothing this last couple of months… well may be I have, but now I’m back. Kind off, I’m actually going out on vacations a couple of weeks in march but the blog will be on autopilot and there are quite a lot of posts in the backlog… there are a couple of months more worth of clever and informative (?) articles, so stay tuned (?^2).

New talk on the way

nico — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:53:49 +0000

I’m polishing my latest talk, “Ninja console” which will be made available to the public soon. More news to come.