There are times when it’s extremely useful to be able to pass some data between different programs running on the same system. For example, you might have multiple programs forming part of the same package, and they need to share some important information or work together to process something.

There are several ways to do it, but my choice in a recent task was to use the named pipes functionality of the Win32 API (working in C++). Note that pipes on other operating systems are a little different, so not all of this information is portable.

I’m in the process of writing up my doctoral thesis, and have had to wrestle with a lot of Word formatting. The biggest difficulty I had was separating the whole document into chapters. I wanted each chapter to start with a big heading like “Chapter 1 Introduction”, and to have that title repeated in the header of each subsequent page. It’s quite fiddly to do, but very useful once you’ve got it setup.

Just in case anybody's wondering, I've not been updating Avid Insight as I've been busy with a new full-time job. I started working as a software engineer for Vertual Ltd. in 2011, and am thoroughly enjoying it. The company makes a very complex virtual reality training system for radiotherapy, incorporating stereoscopic display and head tracking.

I'm getting lots of opportunities to use and expand my knowledge of C++, graphics programming, and user interfaces (among other things). However, as it's a private company, the work that I do has to remain confidential. Plus, I like to get away from computing at least a little during my off-hours!

With that said, I do plan to write up a few posts from time-to-time in the foreseeable future. Probably nothing ground-breaking, but hopefully things that are useful.

I've blogged before about using FlashDevelop to make Flash games for free. Just for fun, I decided to do a very little project tonight... a simple slider puzzle game to challenge myself. I set myself a time target of 3 hours to build the whole thing (assets included) from scratch. Ultimately, I ended up with 3 and a half hours, but I got it working. You can see the result below...