Joy of Programming: Understanding Bit-fields in C
One important feature that distinguishes C as a systems programming language is its support for bit-fields. Let us explore this feature in this column. In C, structure members can be specified with size…
Getting Started with SystemTap
If programming is an art, then debugging is even more so. To be a good programmer, one must master debugging. We have seen some good methods of kernel debugging, e.g., gdb, kgdb, kprobes,…
Loading Library Files in C++
This article demonstrates how to load shared or dynamic library files in programs written in C++, which is not as straightforward as in C. Device drivers and library files have always been associated…
Spicing up the Console for Fun and Profit, Part 2
In the previous part of this article, we manipulated various aspects of the shell and terminals, like prompts, colours, cursor movements, etc, using escape sequences and utilities like tput. Now let’s move to…
Joy of Programming: The Legacy of C
Dennis Ritchie died on the 8th of October 2011, at the age of 70. His lasting contributions to computing include creating the C language, and co-creating the UNIX operating system. In his memory,…
CodeSport (November 2011)
In this month’s column, we will continue our discussion on some of the common loop optimisations performed by the compiler. In last month’s column, I had presented a coding snippet (shown below) and…
GNU Binutils: A Collection of Binary Tools
With years of experience as a systems programming engineer, I’ve realised that to be a great artist of programming, you must understand the basics of source code, output files, linkers etc. So let’s…
Joy of Programming: Scope, Lifetime and Visibility in C
Often, programmers confuse the scope, lifetime and visibility of variables. So I’ll cover these three important concepts in this month’s column. Whenever you declare a variable, you determine its scope, lifetime and visibility….
CodeSport (October 2011)
In this month’s column, let us focus our attention on some of the common compiler optimisations, and on how to write code that can be well optimised by the compiler. In last month’s…
Modify-function-return-value hack! — Part 2
In my previous article on this topic, we discussed some guidelines on how to write a secure application in C. The article focused on functions defined in the application itself. Now, we will…
May 22, 2013
amitsaha — Thank you for your kind comments everyone. I am glad it's been of help.
I am excited to announce my book:...
May 22, 2013
zero client — SUNDE desktop computing solutions are very much cost effective with environmental
concern. With SUNDE, your work place can turn out to...
May 22, 2013
tabsong — pretty nice
May 21, 2013
JKR — More efficient? Probably. More readable? Definitely not.
May 21, 2013
Prashanth Joshi — The author assumes that the first article being introductory in nature is for the beginners. So there is no question...
