Cut and Paste Metadata in Word

This metadata can conflict with the document's own metadata - creating inconsistent results for example in spell checking, within the same document.

Windows Voice Control

 Some options:

• Cortana (deprecated, memory heavy)
• Voice Access (struggles to isolate the "command voice" when there is background noise)

So no infallible options (yet) for Windows Voice Control.

Docking in Windows is a Superpower

Docking was introduced in Windows 7 as Aero Snap. In Windows 11, Snap Layouts and Snap Groups have been added.

Some basic tips - dock one File Explorer on top of another.

• Windows Key and up - for explorer 1
• Windows Key and down - for explorer 2

Keeping Ubuntu Up to Date

Keeping Ubuntu up to date in WSL is a manual process (unless automated).

Even if automated, you may need a "revert to manual" process if automation breaks (for whatever reason).

Some points:

• The /etc directory is your friend in all this
• cat /etc/os-release - needs to be done before and after to check the release has been complete
• You should upgrade regularly - not least because you need to get the latest security updates

To ensure the upgrade can happen successfully you need to check/edit the release-upgrades file.

sudo emacs -rv /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades

Change Prompt=never to Prompt=LTS (the latter checks to see if a new LTS release is available).

Useful commands:

• sudo apt update
• sudo apt full-upgrade
• sudo do-release upgrade

Don't forget to check os-release for successful install.

Official documentation here.

Process Based Automation

If you have a strong, underlying process, it should be trivial to automate it.

Latest Haskell Compilers

A good, up-to-date Haskell compiler is the GHC. 

Unlike earlier compilers e.g. Hugs, GHC has support for concurrency and parallelism, including Software Transactional Memory.

There are some language extensions available, including support for the FFI, or Foreign Function interface, which is enabled by default.

The latest Haskell Report on which the current version of GHC is based on is Haskell 2010.

One unfortunate fact about Haskell is poorly maintained external libraries.

What is IFNDR in C++ And Why is it Important

The June 2026 meeting for the ISO Standard C++ group concluded in Brno. 

A key objective discussed was reduction in undefined behaviour (UB) and IFNDR ("ill formed no diagnostic required") scenarios in C++. 

IFNDR is used greatly in the C++ context and refers to a situation where a program is ill-formed but the compiler is not required to generate an error.  This can result in runtime issues.

A website summarised the dangers of UB can be found here.

RDAP is the new whois

You may see the message on websites "Use of the RDAP service is limited to lawful business purposes only". 

RDAP is the Registration Data Access Protocol developed by the IETF as the successor to whois.

Key difference: 

whois returns free text, RDAP returns JSON, making it machine readable and easier to automate. It also supports RESTful web services, allowing for HTTP based queries, error codes, authentication and access control.

RDAP also supports Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), which are domain names utilizing non-Latin characters. Languages can include Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic or Devanagari. As DNS is limited to ASCII characters, an ASCII encoding called Punycode (deliberately designed to rhyme with Unicode) is used for name translation.

All that said, whois is still probably more frequently used than RDAP.

C++ 26

The new C++ is C++ 26.  It has been effusively promoted by Herb Sutter.  A lot of new features have already been implemented in gcc - MSVC and Intel C++ need to catch up.

Profiles in C++

Profiles are a relatively new concept from the C++ Core Guidelines.

Their aim is to improve code safety, portability and maintainability.

Profiles are (portably) enforceable rules to achieve a specific guarantee. For example a Bounds Safety profile would force the compiler or static analyzer to flag the following:

int arr[5];

arr[10] = 42;  // out of bounds access - flagged by profile

A presentation by Stroustrup at a Safety Study Group explores this. Herb Sutter also published an interesting paper which refers to levelling up versus Rust.

What is a WEBP file?

WEBP is a file image format created by Google (introduced in 2010) providing both lossy and lossless compression, usually producing much smaller file sizes than JPEG or PNG while keeping similar visual quality. 

WEBP is based on the RIFF (the famous Resource Interchange File Format) container structure.

Decline of Computer Magazines in the US

Nicely summarised here.

Visual Studio 2026

Visual Studio 2026 is now out. Previous versions are no longer supported.

C/C++ on VS Code

You can edit C/C++ code in VS Code but you need the C/C++ Extension Pack for more features.

gcc on Windows

gcc on Windows can be used from WSL2. 

gcc --version

gives you the version you are using and the operating system.

gcc versions can be found here.

The C ABI

 The C ABI refers to the C Application Binary Interface.

This will differ depending on platform.

Platform specific ABI specifications include:

x64 ABI Conventions

ABI for Unix/Linux

Very important for C/C++ and assembly programmers.

C++ Value Categories

Every Win Joe knows an lvalue when they see one, but there are subtleties.

glvalue

prvalue

xvalue

Recap here (from cppreference.com).

Flags for cl.exe

cl /EHs 

enable C++ EH (no SEH exceptions)

SEH (Structured Exception Handling) is a Windows-specific mechanism for handling system-level exceptions e.g. access violations or hardware faults, using __try, __except and __finally. It is not part of the C++ standard.

cl /EHc

extern "C" defaults to nothrow

Explanation: extern "C" tells the compiler to use C linkage (C-style symbol names, no name mangling), and by virtue of defaulting to "C mode" we don't have exceptions (the C ABI has no concept of exceptions). 

So extern "C" functions therefore  implicitly move from:

extern "C" void foo();

to:

extern "C" void foo() noexcept;

noexcept was introduced in C++11.

The Return of C++

The Microsoft C/C++ Optimizing Compiler is making a comeback. 

Building an EXE with a decent UI is as easy as this two step process:

1. Opening "Developer Command Prompt" in Windows (hit windows key and type "Developer..")

2. cl /EHsc mySuperUI user32.lib gdi32.lib

Bye bye heavy frameworks which rely on Windows API functions anyway.

High Touch Vs Low Touch Human in the Loop

Some technologies and programming languages are winning on high-touch vs low-touch HITL systems.  This is largely due to the maturity of AI models - where the high quality training is happening - and probably lots of other factors - but it's a fast moving target.  Competitive advantage lies in the low touch.

AI Obsolesence

Interestingly, the race to build new AI features has made older versions of IDEs (Visual Studio case in point) obsolete at breakneck speed, the requirement to constantly upgrade is such that if you linger on even a slightly older version, the AI you relied on could be non-functional.

JetBrains Releases Mellum2

JetBrains (the home of IntelliJ and PyCharm) has released its Mellum2 Mixture-of-Experts coding model, of 12B parameters. 

The model is available under the Apache 2.0 license. 

The model has been published on Hugging Face and can be run locally.

A mixture-of-experts model works via a "gating network" which delegates work to smaller neural networks, the "experts", optimising overall performance. This model also leads to "sparse activation" - which means of all the possible parameters utilised by the model, only a subset are used per input.

Training an MoE model requires training the gating network and training the various "experts".

OpenCode and GLM Models

OpenCode is an open source AI coding agent. It connects to free models and also allows connection to commercial models. GLM models are supported.

C++ 26 is a Work in Progress

The current status of ISO C++ standards can be found here.