Archive for October, 2010

Visual Studio 2005: Speeding up compiles

Tuesday, October 19th, 2010

There’s a hidden switch in Visual Studio 2005 while doubles compile speed.

I know, it sounds ridiculous.  But I’ve tested it. It’s MUCH faster now. The switch works by enabling multi-core processing. I have no idea why Microsoft has hidden this, instead of making it a big, obvious feature.

Anyways. You can enable it by adding /MP to the “Additional options” in “Configuration properties > C/C++ > Commandline”.

(Found it at 1 and 2)

Being online in Jersey

Tuesday, October 12th, 2010

I didn’t expect much when I searched for an option for mobile internet access in Jersey (Channel Islands). It wasn’t really important since our B&B had WiFi. And for such a tiny country I didn’t expect much competition and thus bad service from the telcos.

Wrong. So wrong.

Mobile internet access is ridiculously cheap and easy in Jersey. In fact the only problem was finding out where they sell it (Jersey Telecom, 18 Queen Street, St Helier; Mo-Sa 9:00-17:30). I paid only £9.99 for 1GB of traffic. I wish mobile internet in the Netherlands was that cheap. 😉

And it worked just wonderful. No technical problems (like in Scotland), almost no coverage problems (as in Spain) and no trouble with the charging (as in the Netherlands). Great.

Dangerous CFile::GetStatus

Friday, October 1st, 2010

The third (and I hope final) dangerous posting.

This code looks harmless enough:

CFileStatus rStatus;
CFile::GetStatus (MyFilename, rStatus);

And it will work most of the time. But CFileStatus uses CTime, which is limited to dates after 1.1.1970. If you apply this code to a file with a file-modification date of e.g. 1.1.1960, GetStatus will raise an exception. (Which it isn’t documented to to.) And if you don’t catch that, it will terminate your program.