Starting with Windows Media

I've decided to spend some more time on a few areas which I've learned during my association with my gurus in the software industry. There are few people in the United States and also in India who have helped me to shape myself. Predominantly I'm not an outspoken person, but those seniors understood that I had little hunger for knowledge and provided me that information and helped me to come to this stage. Windows Media Stack, when I started working on it, I was the most nervous person because very soon I realized this is not going to be easy stuff to handle. Indeed, it's the most complex programming world I've ever faced or challenged before.

I started my journey on Media Stack for Windows with the help of James Dailey. I can remember those days when he came from the US and delivered his series of lectures. It was amazing. This was an entry towards a world where programming, troubleshooting, debugging, etc isn't an easy task at all but also full of great learning experiences, every day.

So, there are a couple of seniors who influenced me a lot in Windows Media Stack, like James Dailey, Greg Binkerd, and David. I'm planning to start blogging separately on this area to share whatever little knowledge I've gathered and still learning..... I'll be back soon.

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Reversing char array without splitting the array to tokens

I was reading about strdup, a C++ function and suddenly an idea came to my mind if this can be leveraged to aid in reversing a character array without splitting the array into words and reconstructing it again by placing spaces and removing trailing spaces. Again, I wanted an array to be passed as a function argument and an array size to be passed implicitly with the array to the function. Assumed, a well-formed char array has been passed into the function. No malformed array checking is done inside the function. So, the function signature and definition are like below: Below is the call from the client code to reverse the array without splitting tokens and reconstructing it. Finally, copy the reversed array to the destination. For GNU C++, we should use strdup instead _strdup . On run, we get the following output: Demo code

XOR (Exclusive OR) for branchless coding

The following example shows the array reversing using the XOR operator . No need to take any additional variable to reverse the array. int main(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[]) { char str[] = "I AM STUDENT"; int length = strlen(str); for(int i = 0; i < ((length/2)); i++) { str[i] ^= str[length - (1+i)]; str[length - (1+i)] ^= str[i]; str[i] ^= str[length - (1+i)]; } cout << str << endl; return 0; } The above example is one of the uses of XOR but XOR comes in handy when we can do branchless coding methods like butterfly switch etc. Sometimes this is very effective in speeding up the execution. Let's see one of the uses of XOR in branchless coding. I am taking a simple example of Y = | X |. Yes, I am generating abs of a supplied number. So, my function signature/definition in C++ looks like below: int absoluteBranch( int x) { if (x < 0 ) { return -x; } else { retur

Power of Two

I n this post will be discussing how to calculate if a number is a power of two or not. As an example, 8 is a power of two but the number 10 is not. There are many ways we can solve this. First , we will take an approach which is simple and iterative. In this case, we will calculate the power of two one by one and check with the supplied number. The below code illustrates it. bool isPowerofTwo(unsigned num) { auto y = 1; while (0 != y) { if (num == y) return true; if (num < y) return false; y <<= 1; } return false; } Second , assuming, the number is a 32-bit number, this is also an iterative solution. In this scenario, iterating all bits and counting the set bits. Any number which is a power of 2 will have only one bit set and the rest will be zeros. As an example, 8 in binary representation is 1000. Using this observation, we can implement an iterative solution. bool isPowerofTwo(unsigned num) { auto one_count = 0; for (auto index = 0; index < 32;

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