I always meant to write about that, but I forgot every single time. Basically, with the 12th generation, Intel simply cheated. Most of their gains were simply gained by increasing the frequency and as result considerably increased power consumption to quite crazy values. With good cooling and motherboard, 120900 can consume almost 250W of power.

And most people do not know this, but almost all energy in electronic components is converted to pure heat. So effectively 250W consumed power by CPU/GPU will be converted to 250W of heat.

For most people, 250W is just a number. Just to give you an idea, a long time ago I had a room with 8 degrees C (46 Fahrenheit). It is quite cold.

I will not compare all features one by one and I will only compare development with each engine.

Unreal Engine supports blueprints and C++. Let me review them in detail.

Unreal Engine Blueprints

Blueprints are really good for an inexperienced developer and allow an easy way to start doing some programming in their project. You can drag and drop nodes that do particular actions and connect them using your mouse. It looks intuitive and easy. And at the beginning it is.

But there is a reason why visual programming never worked. And there are a few reasons for that: it is much slower to write and much harder to read. It works only for very simple cases.

For example, imagine

Recently I figured out that Windows 10 has a built-in ssh application. Great! If you would like to connect to Linux PC using it, you need to use the following command:

ssh -i key.pem username@ipaddress_or_host

But if you will try to run it you will get following error:

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

@         WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE!          @

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
Permissions for 'key.pem' are too open.
It is required that your private key files are NOT accessible by others.
This private key will be ignored.

It is a very strange error message. I would say it is the typical Linux way. A smart person will figure it out and a dumb person doesn’t need it. What it trying to tell,

Recently I was asked to investigate a strange crash that happens in our application. The application calls function Test that returns HRESULT. This function is part of the interface. Let’s call it IMyIntf. The caller is located in the main.dll and the interface is implemented in the module.dll.

And this call failed. Initially, I started checking the function implementation of the Test function to see what can be possibly wrong there but after some time I found that it returns a rather strange HRESULT. In this call stack HRESULT was 0xd337fe00. I cannot find any description for such a strange HRESULT.

I’m sure many of you watching some tutorial videos on YouTube. I do. And there are different people who do the talking. Some are talking fast, and some are talking slow.  Some of them put quite condensed information and some put a lot of “water” in their talk.

For quite some time I was watching on regular speed, but a few years ago I found really nice advice to use faster speeds. I tried 1.25 initially and it was amazing. If you have a tutorial that is one hour long, you can finish watching it in 48 minutes and save 12 minutes of your life. 1.25 speed does not distort the voice much and it is almost the same as

Some time ago, I, like many of you moved to Visual Studio 2022. It works great with C# and eventually, I decided to move C++ activities to VS 2022 as well. After I installed everything, I created C++ Console Application and I try to compile it. To my surprise, it didn’t work, and got the following message:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Professional\VC\Tools\MSVC\14.32.31326\include\yvals.h(12,10): fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'crtdbg.h': No such file or directory

After some research, I found an article that helped me. For some reason, there is an invalid path to Windows SDK in the registry. To fix this issue you need to go to this registry key:

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Kits\Installed Roots

And change

For many years, when I get a new notebook, I wipe it out and install a fresh version of Windows. There are multiple reasons for that:

  • To instantly get rid of unwanted software that takes valuable disk space
  • To avoid unwanted software draining your battery and heating your notebook (especially in the summertime)
  • To remove potential conflicts with the installed software. For example, a trial version of Microsoft Office conflicts with another office package. Even removing Microsoft Office does not help
  • To avoid problems with an installed antivirus solution. The best example is McAfee. I spent weeks or even months of my life fighting with it. It is the worst antivirus on the market. Built-in Windows Defender is much better and provides better protection

I think many of you a familiar with function SetWindowsHookEx. It is quite useful function, and we use it in a lot of places in our software. But recently I found interesting issue: if exception is raised in hook function, then Windows will terminate your application with status code 0x C000041D STATUS_FATAL_USER_CALLBACK_EXCEPTION. But there is one caveat: if you run application from debugger, Windows will not terminate application and will just suppress exception. So, if you have encounter that exception as developer, you may think that everything is correct, but when end user will run your application – application will crash.

I work primarily with languages that have native support for exceptions and it feels kind of wrong. There is

I did some research on this topic and I decided to share my findings.

First reason: Standards

On most 32 bits systems type short is 2 bytes long, type int is 4 bytes long. But there are also standards.

According to C90 standard:

sizeof(short) <= sizeof(int) <= sizeof(long)

According to C99 standard:

sizeof(short) <= sizeof(int) <= sizeof(long) <= sizeof(long long)

If int size will 8 bytes long then there will be no type that it is 4 bytes long because due to standard, long type should be at least the same size as int type. It is possible to make short type 4 bytes long