For my new position, I need to improve my knowledge of the C++ programming language (which I did not use basically since 2010). So I have started reading the book Discovering Modern C++ by Peter Gottschling to get up to speed with, well, modern C++. In this post, I would like to talk about universal initialization (a.k.a. brace-initialization) that was introduced in C++11. The syntax for the universal initialization is the following:

If you work on an M1 Mac computer (that is, on an Apple computer with an ARM processor) and use Conda to manage Python environments and packages, sometimes you need to work with packages that are available only for x86_64 architecture, that is, for Macs with Intel processors (x86_64 is a common name for 64-bit Intel processors). For example, I ran into this problem when I wanted to go through SnakeMake tutorial, and it turned out that many bioinformatics tools (needed for the tutorial) are not available for the M1 architecture.

As any programming language, JavaScript allows to pack useful things into functions, and it is the key to good JavaScript knowledge, to use them efficiently. In this post, I describe three ways that the functions can be declared in JavaScript, talk about visibility of variables inside the functions, how to have optional function arguments with default values, how to create closures (functions, bound to outer variables), and how to use recursion.

If you have a GitLab repo and would like to mirror it in your GitHub account, it can be set up directly in the GitLab repo settings. Note that here we use new fine-grained tokens functionality of GitHub (which is currently in beta, as of May 2023).

I was learning recently about solving problems that use breadth-first search (BFS). This is a family of computer science algorithms that traverse tree data structures “by levels”. That is, starting at the root, we process all nodes on level 1, then all nodes on level 2, etc. One typical application of BFS is to find the shortest path between the root and the given nodes. To implement BFS, one should use the queue data structure.

I had videos in H.264 codec that I wanted to reencode to H.265. The reason is that H.265 (a.k.a. High Efficiency Video Codec, HEVC) is a more modern and efficient format than H.264 (a.k.a. Advanced Video Codec, AVC), which allows to keep the same quality with about twice less storage.

As I make from time to time YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok videos, which I need to backup, it is always good to store your data in the most storage-efficient format.

Often, when running a program in console, one needs to save all its output to a file. Very often, such a program writes both to the standard output (stdout) and to the standard error output (stderr). For example, by default, in a Python program the print function writes to stdout and the functions of the logging module to stderr. Therefore, one needs to redirect both stdout and stderr to the same file.

Sometimes, when you try to eject an external volume (logical part of a disk), macOS fails to do this as some files are still open. Frequently, it is clear what files are open by which program and can be closed. However, not always so. It has just happened to me — a file was open by stuck QuickLook app. To find the list of open files on that volume: lsof /Volumes/MyVolume

Conditions To execute some block of code depending on a condition, the following constructions are used; they are exactly like in C programming language. Simple if: let x = 7; if (x > 5) { console.log("x is greater than five"); } x is greater than five Construction if-else: x = 3; if (x > 5) { console.log("x is greater than five"); } else { console.log("x is not greater than five"); } x is not greater than five And the conditions can be chained together:

I was recently studying Javascript out of curiousity as this language is used so much in the current web and mobile development. These are notes on basic Javascript knowledge to better memorize its syntax.