Why do I have to write my own mod operator in C or C++ just because the idiots who came up with the language couldn’t do it right in the first place? (Yes, I’ve just had to fix a bug because of this.)Look here.
Ultimate Mac Geekiness – read at your productivity’s peril.I was looking through my bookmarks menu today and caught myself worrying about how long I’d had the menu dragged down. Why? Because in the years before modern operating systems there was a thing called co-operative multitasking (as opposed to pre-emptive multitasking which is used on most systems now) and one way of crashing another application or screwing up a disk burn or interrupting a track playing was to hold a menu open long enough that the other application needed process time. I must have only encountered this a couple of times in the whole of my use of these operating systems, but to this day I find I don’t like holding menus down for long periods.
The only interaction available in the radio of the past was choosing the time and station that you wanted to listen to.The internet is fully interactive though: so instead of choosing a station, choose the actual music you want, whenever you want. Traditional radio was supported by adverts, the DJ made announcements. This is already in place with Spotify. Suggestions for new music are available, but we can _choose_ to ignore them if we want. However, people like their stand-alone systems – I wonder who could make those? There’s one big problem though: will Spotify actually stick around?
We’ve been discussing making my PVRTC stuff open source. It makes me wonder why the rest of our software isn’t open source too – after all we’ve always made a big deal of how our software’s free and we make our money from the hardware. Why not go the whole hog and make the software open too?
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/magic-cauldron/ar01s18.html
The rest of the article is interesting too.
See this
Game Design has become a profession. When I started writing games the programmer (sometimes the artist) was the game designer and most of it was considered self-evident. You didn’t waste hours of time deciding whether X feature took away from the player’s focus or whether Y feature interrupted the flow of them game.
Now, this did pave the way to plenty of poor games, some that were practically unplayable. I don’t doubt that there’s a need for more thought and particularly more testing for modern games. But I’m sure I can’t be the only person who’s noticed that modern games all seem to be homogenized in their accessibility. There’s no mystery left – half the fun of a game is discovering or unlocking the potential in it, learning the tricks or locations where certain things happen, learning the game. Nowadays we get a walk-through with some irritatingly west coast US accented guy with a husky voice explaining some unintuitive game move with a ridiculous jargon name and that’s it.
“You’re supposed to be able to just pick it up and play though!” Perhaps I don’t want that? Perhaps I want the reward from putting in a little bit of effort that immersiveness gained by investing a little brain and the subsequent reward? Besides there are many great games that you couldn’t pick up and play (Kick Off, Elite, Falcon). They wouldn’t have been great if they’d been any other way either.
This wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be:
int banana = -1;
printf(“div: %d ; shift: %d\n”, banana/2, banana>>1);
Gives:
div: 0 ; shift: -1
Weird, huh?
Why the hell can’t Word do a numbered list starting at 0?
This will be continued.
Believe it or not I used to enjoy exercise, even in bad weather, mud and surprisingly even when it can be painful. I played rugby for years, for instance. Judging by the mayhem I enjoyed at the weekend at paintball, it seems that I still do, as well.
What I don’t enjoy, and in fact have never enjoyed, is exercise for the sake of it. I’ve always been happy to run after a ball in order to win a football game, I’d even pelt round a muddy track in some godawful cross-country event back in the day (not sure about this now tbh). What I object to is the feeling of utter pointlessness and futility conjured by ‘adult’ exercise (and by adult I’m not meaning the internet term – I still like that). Running on a treadmill, going for a jog, doing some godawful circuit-training – why the hell do people do it? I’m bored within a few minutes, my body is continually asking the question: “why are we running, Gordon?” and my brain really doesn’t have a decent answer. There seems to be this determination in adult life to remove any form of competitiveness or similar motivation from physical activity. Maybe this is better for girls???
So, I suppose the point of this ranting post is that I’d like some solution where I can pursue exercise in which the need for continual self-motivation is mitigated by the desire to win or succeed and where I don’t have to continually lose to people who have nothing better to do than play sport more than I have time to or put up with mockney idiots (another reason i hate the gym, clubs, pubs, Watford, you get the idea…). A return to playground football with my friends would be nice – I am well aware that this formed the backbone of my extreme physicial fitness as a child – I’m also aware of the unlikelinesss of this coming about.
Maybe I should play paintball (rather too expensive for regular outings, I’m afraid). The last time I had a good exercise activity was when a friend organised the rest of my friends to play in the University 5-aside football league. We lost a lot. But when we won (or even scored) it was great – we played as a team and we all put effort in. Then we hung out afterwrads. And given we were rubbish (most of us weren’t even what you’d call active people at the time) we still finished mid-table and beat a team of chavvy neds on the way (that was a great game – they were all better than us individually, but we defended like hell and somehow managed to score enough goals through sheer determination. They even started playing dirty in the second half)
Every now and again I find something randomly in someone’s code, whether it’s a comment or just a funny variable name. In this case it’s the default information in the about box for a cocoa document-based application:
Engineering:
Some peopleHuman Interface Design:
Some other peopleTesting:
Hopefully not nobodyDocumentation:
WhoeverWith special thanks to:
Mom
Made me smile 
This blog is likely to be updated only sporadically, to be full of extremely eclectic/geeky nonsense and probably of no interest to anyone.
