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Coding: Java versus C/C++
Mon, 27 Feb 2006

Trying to compare any two programming languages is akin to invoking Godwin's Law (which dictates that once a usenet poster is compared to Hitler, the conversation is immediately over, and that this ultimately will occur in any sufficiently long usenet flameware.) Still, I had an argument with a fellow one morning and thought I might pose as the C/C++ wanker for a posting.

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Tech: Why Buildings Do Not Have Gargoyles
Sun, 20 Nov 2005

This posting could just as easily be called 'Why do all websites have to be black on white?' but its easier for people to wonder 'Why do all buildings have the same sized door?' In software, there is a transition going on.. a battle in the trenches between the software artist and the software engineer - a battle thats been going on as long as the industry has existed and that has been waged in probably every other industry since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Stated simply - the artist, the cowboy, the path-finder must be replaced by the machine, a process, standards - the quality controlled English-style boiled down variation of itself. While there are pros and cons to both sides of the war, you can be sure of one thing - no one likes to lose a battle.

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Coding: How to write a CPU emulator
Tue, 18 Oct 2005

Fairly regularly folks will ask me how a CPU emulator works, or how to write one.. or even the whole shbang - how an emulator (for a game console or arcade machine, say) is written. I'm sorry to report its not really all that hard or mysterious (just tedious and painstaking to do from scratch!) as in this day and age the whole virtual machine (VM) concept, and emulation in general, has gotten pretty widespread and well understood. Its like anything else - a car is pretty magical until you look under the hood and start taking pieces off, and writing an emulator is no different. Let me know if you'd like me to post another article about porting or writing a whole emulator as its too large a topic for just one post.. but here I'll give you the high-level overview of CPU emulation.. the heart/engine of any emulation project.

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Coding: A quick note on how to check things out in a subversion version controled repository
Sun, 28 Aug 2005

I'm still using CVS (and occasionally RCS) for my version control madness, though a lot of folks have switched over to any number of tools from the plethora now available, such as darcs and subversion. CVS is quite mature and is the norm for most open source projects such as BSD and Linux, and is used with SourceForge. As such, dozens of tutorials exist and many or most developers know how to scrape by. With all the newer tools out there, you don't always remember off the top of your head how to get some data out of them. I had to look up the command to check something out of subversion, so thought I'd let you know..

Should you wish to check out the PSP version of SDL, do so like this:

svn co svn://svn.pspdev.org/psp/trunk/SDL

Good luck, my friends in Louisana!

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Tech: Ideas are cheap; work is not.
Wed, 06 Jul 2005

Every once in awhile, someone will come up to me and say such-and-such a feature is easy to implement so why isn't it there already, or why won't it be there next week -- so I have to inform them of how their idea may be incredible, but is actually an enormous amount of work, or perhaps that its only a good idea for them and not many others would care (few have any idea how other people actually use a tool :), or how running a business and answering support mail eat up a tonne of time. As you all know I'm chatty and friendly and encourage folks to write me with good ideas, but sometimes they get rude and suggest "some Russian 12 year old will just whip it up and put you out of business if you don't implement my pet idea and have it on my desk by Monday" -- to which I can only respond with "they're welcome to try." You see my friends, I known a secret - ideas are great, but take seconds to come up with - actually building and proving a concept takes a lot work, and supporting the results for the long haul is the serious heavy lifting and where the respect comes in.

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Coding: Like lego out of thin air ...
Sun, 03 Jul 2005

The point of this post is just to remark on a couple of thoughts we developers have always had, and how they're coming to pass earlier than we thought. I always said that good developers put themselves out of business, by which I mean that they do a good solid maintainable job and then move on, leaving the resulting application to be supported by sysadmins or runtime staff. Likewise, another old tenet is that developers are like traditional tradesmen - we can make our own tools once given the basics - development tools get better through investment of developer time and every developer hacks out his own helper tools for his toolbox. These two ideas when coupled together always produced a dream where someday developers would create such powerful and easy to use development tools that just about anyone could create new applications - that end users could wave their arms and pop out any old application they needed, provide the components were already available or derivable.

Aside: But first, some quick stories about companies having heart: A neighbour was telling me a story about a cousin of his who worked for one of the Japanese auto-makers here in Canada; after he'd risen up a few ranks they shipped him to Japan for a course, though when he arived a number of shop floor employees were ill. The company president was filling in, since the job had to be done rather than let productivity suffer. I'd like to see the CEO of General Motors pulling his weight on the floors :) I'd like to say that companies these days need to have heart (and/or intelligence - which would prevent things like outsourcing to the point our own children have nowhere to work..) but then you think back to Confenderation Life, one of the original great Canadian companies that went under a decade back -- they had Christmas parties for their employees every year, and it evidently didn't help them compete .. Anyway.

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Coding: Unicode (or "How to disembowel and re-embowel your data in 21 days")
Tue, 07 Jun 2005

(With apologies to Stanislaw Lem for butchering a line of his.) (Rant on.) It is probably fortunate for the industry that many of todays computing technologies were birthed in the west -- or more to point -- birthed in a location where the local alphabet, counting system, punctuation marks and hints can all fit within a single byte of memory[1], using an alphabet called ASCII[2] (in nerdlish.) Sure, its made my life easier with all the popular programming languages having their keywords in English, but my point is that it probably assisted growth in the field by not having to tackle the issue of dealing with pictographic languages day one so inventors could instead focus on dealing with getting the machine to display to a screen instead of a lineprinter.

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