The missing C++ smart pointer.

If you cannot solve the proposed problem try to solve first some related problem. Could you imagine a more accessible related problem? A more general problem? A more special problem? An analogous problem? Could you solve a part of the problem? — G. Polya, How to Solve It

Which is probably why we face so many times the XY problem on forum, QAs sites, and mailing lists.

This post is a detailed discussion into user profiles, their directories, and how they are—to put it bluntly—in total disarray on Windows and Linux (I haven’t used a Mac in ages, but I assume the situation is very similar there, too). Applications treat the user profile as a dumping ground, and any user with a reasonably wide list of installed software will find their user profile very difficult to traverse after some time in use. There are platform conventions and attempts to standardise things on more open-source platforms, but a lot of developers resolutely refuse to change the behaviour of their software for a variety of reasons (some less valid than others). — $HOME, Not So Sweet $HOME

TIL about lei: Using lei, b4, and mutt to do kernel development.

Non-Euclidean Geometry Online: a Guide to Resources: As the title suggests, a bunch of online resources to learn more about elliptical and hyperbolic geometries.

GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?: Yet another nice example of why parallel is such a great program. I learned to use it a while ago, after having read Jearoen Janssens’ wonderful book, Data Science at the Command Line, in its first edition. BTW, the 2nd edition is available online for free.

Home sweet home.

Usually I send read-only documents to clients. They don’t know or care what program created the PDF I sent them. The fact that they cannot edit my reports is a feature, not a bug: if I’m going to sign off on something, I need to be sure that it doesn’t include any changes that someone else made that I’m unaware of. Convert LaTeX to Microsoft Word

I used to do the same for years when I was consulting. Main issue was tabular output, which can be beautifully rendered in $\LaTeX$, but not so in plain MS Word.

Data-oriented design takes its cues from the data which is seen or expected. Instead of planning for all eventualities, or planning to make things adaptable, there is a preference for using the most probable input to direct the choice of algorithm. Instead of planning to be extendable, it plans to be simple and replaceable, and get the job done. Extendable can be added later, with the safety net of unit tests to ensure it remains working as it did while it was simple. Luckily, there is a way to make your data layout extendable without requiring much thought, by utilising techniques developed many years ago for working with databases. — Data-Oriented Design