What the IF?

If you had these both if conditions, what would you choose to put in your code?

The one:
if(rc == STATUS_SUCCESS)
{
    doSomething();
}

The other:
if(STATUS_SUCCESS == rc)
{
    doSomething();
}


Intuitively, the answer would be (rc == STATUS_SUCCESS), but! What if you forgot one = and wrote (rc = STATUS_SUCCESS) instead? This will be an assignment inside the condition, which will compile, but definitely not what you want to. Now look at the the second option, if you wrote (STATUS_SUCCESS = rc), this will not compile (since STATUS_SUCCESS  is a const) and you'll know you've a bug in compilation.

Note1: you may say: it's not gonna happen to me, I won't forget that =. But believe me, you will forget it and if you didn't go with the second option, you'll be up all night searching for that = (like I did).
Note2: using a Static Analysis Tools (aka Lint-like tools) can expose an assignment within an if-condition warning.

Threads Question

I heard a question this week, and I thought it would be nice sharing it here, I did solve it, however, I'm not 100% sure I did it right :), so here it is:

What is the maximum value the variable i can get in each case below, assuming that it's a global int initialized by zero (int i=0) and the code in each case is running on 2 threads?

case1:

while(i < 1000)

{

    i++;

}

case2:

while(i < 1000)

{

    ++i;

}

case3:

while(i++ < 1000);

case4:

while(++i < 1000);

Ethernet packet generator: packEth

Recently at work, I had to debug some Tx flows for transmitting Ethernet packets, and pings didn't help since I needed to build a specific packet with some parameters. After searching the web I found this tool called pachEth, which allows you to simply build 802.3, ver II and 802.1q packets and transfer them using interfaces supports Ethernet in your machine.

S&M (Simple and Main, not this S&M)