Bash Prompt and Title

I've updated my .bashrc because I want the title of an xterm or gnome-term to display the current directory or the currently running process.

here are the relevant lines

export PS1='\[\e]0;$PWD\007\]\u@\h:\W$'

trap 'echo -ne "\e]0;$BASH_COMMAND\007"' DEBUG

Pooled resource pattern

Time to implement a pattern by means of a c++ template. I've used nearly identical code twice in the same project.

One case is a pool of easy curl objects:

CURL *WebResponse::getFromPool()

{

// all actions with the pool must be locked

boost::mutex::scoped_lock lock(poolMutex);

if (curlPool.empty())

{

CURL *pCurl = curl_easy_init();

if (!pCurl)

throw ("allocation failure CURL");

return pCurl;

}

CURL *p = curlPool.front();

curlPool.pop_front();

return p;

}

void WebResponse::putBackInPool(CURL *pCurl)

{

// all actions with the pool must be locked

boost::mutex::scoped_lock lock(poolMutex);

curlPool.push_back(pCurl);

}

The other a pool of libmemcached objects. This should be an interesting use of templates. I'll post what I come up with soon.

Using stl strings std::string with Windows wide characters

This is much easier than it sounds for example:

#include < string >
#include < algorithm >

//Make a wide char string type.
typedef std::basic_string< wchar_t > wstring;

// initialize a wstring
wstring ws = L"Hello World";

// make the string lower case
std::transform(ws.begin(),ws.end(),ws.begin(),tolower);

Windows programmer trick #1 --> FindWindowEx & Dialogs

FindWindowEx can be used to find not just your run of the mill window, but dialogs as well.

The documentation is a bit sparse, but makes reference to the MAKEINTATOM macro, this macro just like MAKEINTRESOURCE (they are practically the same), is used when an API call asks for a string but you have an int.


The secret to finding a Dialog with FindWindowEx is to use MAKEINTATOM like so:


HWND hwndDlg = FindWindowEx(NULL,NULL,MAKEINTATOM(32770),NULL);

32770 is the system atom for a dialog box class.

The above line of code searches for dialog boxes with the desktop as the parent window. Works handy for finding tool-windows etc..