Author: Alexander Mamchenkov

Though I am not coding in C++ and my experience in these languages is minor, I am ofter asked to help students with the studies in the subject. So was the case recently, so I ended up writing two small programs: one has to do with link lists and few functions to work with them like push, pop, insert, remove, sort, print, search and the other one is a classic thing with drawing triangular from star (or any other) symbol.

Just in case someone is learning C++ now, you can download the code and go through, hope it will help or give an idea.

So here is the link_list.cpp stuff and here is a star.cpp.

BTW, those who are using Windows and something like DevC++ often can see a call to system(‘PAUSE’) which is really bad and works only on Windows. While doing link list thing, I did a function called user_wait(), which does the same, but  in more natural way, here it is:

  /* waits for user to press Enter. Good replacement for system('PAUSE') which works only on Windows */
  void user_wait ()  {
      char blah;

      std::cout << std::endl << "... Press Enter to Continue ..." << std::endl; // print msg
      std::cin.get(blah); // wait for Enter
      std::cout << std::endl; // put newline
  }

It’s been ages to post here (as usual), so I just thought of putting couple of things about CakePHP and stuff related.

First of all, if you are developing under windows, and the production server is running Linux, keep in mind that Linux file system is case-sensitive. So if you create an image linked to logo.jpg, while the file will be logo.JPG – it won’t work. CakePHP tries to locate file on filesystem and it will look only for logo.jpg and fail in case you put logo.JPG.

Second, if you need to have direct access to MySQL to run some queries using native PHP mysql_query methods, but you don’t want to specify DB settings twice, you can always extract current connection from CakePHP models as follows (assuming you are using some model called ‘User’ and it is available in the current class):

$dataSource = $this->User->getDataSource();
$db = $dataSource->connection;
$result = mysql_query("SELECT .... WHERE .... LIMIT 10,20",$db);

I use this when I need to work with huge tables to run some CakePHP shell scripts faster :)