WDFME.exe using up resources

Recently, I found CPU usage stagnating at 100%. Task manager showed that aggregated CPU usage of all my processes consumed was much less than that. Check processes owned by all users, I found WDFME.exe consuming CPU heavily. It seemed quite unnecessary as my hard disk is of Seagate and the "WD" in the name suggested "Western Digital". So, I killed it. It is essentially the software that comes along with Western digital external hard drives. As it turns out, it is not necessary and it a known resource hog.

Concatenating wide character strings

Today I was looking at concatenating multiple wide character strings. I was dealing with PWSTRs. As it turns out, I needed to use wstring to do it. The following code illustrates the method.

std::wstring mywstring(mystring);
std::wstring concatted_stdstr = L"hello " + mywstring + L" blah";
LPWSTR concatenated = concatted_stdstr.c_str();

However, the above gives us a read-only value for the concatenated string. We can use wcsdup() to get a writeable copy. Otherwise, we can cast the read-only string to a writeable one as follows.

PWSTR value = const_cast (concatenated);

Failed optimization probably

Uber drives are taking a longer route because of some misbehaving optimization in Google maps it seems. When a cab is booked near the main gate of Pearl Village (as shown below) the route shown to the driver is optimised one. However, when a booking is done from the far end of the society, the cabbie is shown a rather long route. A part of this way is actually a dirt road. Uber should consider feedback from its drivers regarding such cases.

HolidayIQ share feature broken

The HolidayIQ app did not have share facility before so you could only read their blogs when you get a push notification but not share it with somebody. Recently, I was glad to see the share feature in their app. However, when I tried using it by sharing on WhatsApp, it seems they messed up again. The shared URL is a shortened URL so the problem is not quite apparent on first sight but when a person opens the URL in a browser on a phone that does not have the app, the URL does not work with a message that the URL was not understood (This message was from Firefox. Other browsers will have similar issues.). The problem is that the URL specifies incorrect protocol. Instead of http:// the shortened URL expands to one starting with holiday:// With phones that have the app, this URL is opened in the HolidayIQ app and causes no issues. However, I think they should use a http:// URL while sharing.