Function disfunction



The Old New Thing, a great development site BTW, has an article on IA64 development. While that may not be of interest to most folks, what is neat is the illustration of improper calling syntax. In this case, Win32 CreateThread and all of the grievously screwed up examples that have spread all over the web. And even MSDN is one of the offenders!



"This is hardly the only web page that supplies buggy sample code. Here's sample code from a course at Old Dominion University that makes the same mistake, and sample code from Long Island University, It's like shooting fish in a barrel. Just google for CreateThread LPTHREAD_START_ROUTINE and pretty much all the hits are people calling CreateThread incorrectly. Even sample code in MSDN gets this wrong. Here's a whitepaper that misdeclares both the return value and the input parameter in a manner that will crash on Win64... And it's all fun until somebody gets hurt."



Desynchrony



Looks like Asynchrony shut down a few days ago. This was a community development site that, IMO, didn't offer enough to developers to make it worthwhile. I looked at it originally for BadBlue and SwiftTouch, but didn't think it was worth pursuing.



Tweaking MySQL



Kuro5hin has a much-needed article on Tweaking MySQL which has invariably attracted the hordes of units who insist that only Postgres, Oracle, text-files, or magnetic coils are right for the job. Bottom line is that some sites grew up with MySQL and - with a bit of parameter-tuning - they might live a little longer. Or at least until they can upgrade to DataBoy 2000 or whatever technology is needed.