Donnie’s Blog

Today’s interesting C++ question comes from one of my students:

class Widget {
private:
  double m_distance;
  ...
};

Widget w;
w.distance() = 62;

Question 1: How does this work?
Question 2: Is this even a good idea?

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I just finished a very interesting book called “One Jump Ahead: Challenging Human Supremacy in Checkers.” It was written by Jonathan Schaeffer, the main force behind the creation of Chinook, one of the absolute best checkers playing programs ever created. (You can even play it, but expect to be beaten!)

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Yay, another season of Battlestar Galactica has started! I almost missed the first episode (being in another country at the time…), but fortunately I was able to catch the last airing. At least I hope I did. I had to set up the VCR to record it, and hopefully I figured that out correctly. (Yeah yeah, even programming teachers have trouble with VCRs sometimes.)

I’ll find out in a couple of hours whether my efforts were successful or not.

By the way, check out the ten “webisodes” that were posted on the BSG website leading up to the season premiere. I don’t think they’re really critical to the plot, but they were good filler while we waited for October to get here…

The last few days have been really aggravating from a systems-administration perspective. I needed to make backups of several computers, which isn’t such a big deal by itself - I have a backup strategy for both the Windows and the Linux boxes I baby-sit. The problem turned out to be, “Where in the world is my external hard disk??!”

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