This is a follow up on my previous post about need to protect access to even simplest variables when working in multi-threaded environment. In this post I would like to explain what’s going on under the hood and why you actually need some protection here.

I ran into one interesting problem. I found a process stuck on mutex. This sounds like a common deadlock, but it wasn’t that obvious. Thread that was stuck is the only thread in the process. 

Folks, there seems to be some technical issues with “Notify me when new comments arrive” feature. The feature allows you to post a comment on a alexonlinux.com and receive email notifications when someone responds. I got few complains about spam comments getting to people’s mailbox. And now it sends multiple emails too. So I decided to […]

Bloom filter is a data structure that contains set of elements. Unlike regular data structures it cannot contain data that is associated with certain key. Neither it can contain keys themselves. The only type of information it can contain is whether certain key belongs to a set or not. You must be wondering what it […]

Before joining Dell I was mostly working in kernel writing in C programming language. At Dell I still work on mostly low level stuff, but this time it is user-mode, so I am not tied up to C anymore. We’re writing in C++ and I am learning C++. One of the less appealing things for […]

One of the great things about gcc and in particular its C/C++ preprocessor is various extensions that it has. In this post I would like to briefly describe three of them. One allows to turn C/C++ token into a string. Here token is anything that you can pass as an argument to a macro. Second allows you […]

Every once in awhile, I have to draw a UML diagram. I rarely do serious designs with UML, however sometimes I do need to depict some piece of code in a diagram and UML seems to be the best notation around. Unfortunately, various sources of information on UML tend to over-complicate things. I am not software architect […]

Here is an interesting article written by Evan Jones. The article explains how you can be guaranteed when your data is on disk. In case you’re wondering, when write(), fwrite() or any other library call that writes data to disk reports success you are not guaranteed that the data is actually on the disk. In […]

As you know, I changed a couple of workplaces during my career. Long story short, one interesting thing that I noticed in different companies is various models for multi-threaded programs (mostly for large embedded systems).

When I started learning Python, I was looking for a programming language that would replace BASH, AWK and SED. I am a C/C++ programmer and as such I better invest my time into studying C and C++. Instead, every time I needed some complex script I opened up a book on BASH and refreshed my […]