Games on Rails

So, I have the opportunity to help design a game SDK. On the one hand, I can go "sprites, sounds, physics," etc. And on the other hand, I can say Ruby on Rails. Which is to say, I can look to RoR as an inspiration of a very successful framework …

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Virtual methods are thread unsafe

In my February 15th SD Times column on the future of concurrent programming models, I wrote "[A] basic rule for thread safety is 'either write objects with no fields or write objects with no virtual method calls'...." I received an email today from someone asking about why virtual method calls …

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Sudoku source code available on MSDN

::: {.Section1}

Source code for Sudoku game like that in the Microsoft Touch Pack for UMPCs has been released on MSDN. "This article closely examines Stephen Toub's Tablet PC-based implementation of Sudoku. It is the same implementation in the Touch Pack, a software package that comes preinstalled on ultra-mobile PCs (UMPCs …
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Breast cancer and taxes

Instead of blogging about what's really going on in my life, I'll just say that I'm always surprised at the amount of whining I hear from computer professionals about doing taxes. Not whining about taxes, which is more than understandable, especially for the self-employed, but whining about doing taxes. Doing …

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Functional vs. OOP

::: {.Section1} Something I’ve been finding myself doing:

[class Foo{]{style="font-family:\"Courier New\""}

[  int someState;]{style="font-family:\"Courier New\""}

[ ]{style="font-family:\"Courier New\""}

[  static int Bar(int state)]{style="font-family:\"Courier New\""}

[  {]{style="font-family:\"Courier New\""}

[    return state * state;]{style="font-family:\"Courier New\""}

[  }]{style="font-family:\"Courier New\""}

[ ]{style="font-family …

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"Meltdown expected"? Fetch me my cattle prod!

A cab rider was detained for singing along to the Clash song "London Calling." Geez, lucky he wasn't singing "Guns of Brixton"

Gawd. I am so happy I'm not a teenager today. Given the bands I liked, I'd probably be in Guantanamo by now. I know that some of the …

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Crossing the Chasm: Programming Languages Edition

::: {.Section1} [Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm is the best explanatory text of why tools succeed in the software development world (its scope is broader than SD, but SD is smack in the middle of its explanatory power). The basic idea is that dividing the world into a bell curve of …

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Use Eiffel for OSS, Get The IDE for free

Eiffel Software, makers of the Eiffel programming language, have made their IDE EiffelStudio available under a "dual license." Use it for commercial software, pay; use it for OSS, get it for free. Interesting idea and a good opportunity to see why Eiffel is a well-respected language.

Well-respected, but never very …

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"Benchmarking inside a Virtual PC is wrong at every possible level" : Really?

Is this true? I was under the impression that virtualization technology had gotten to the point where this kind of work was fine. If not, I'll try things out on real hardware.

Update: Trying out the n-queens problem (which I think is probably a pretty close match) with n = 14 …

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Motorized inflatable pool lounger

::: {.Section1} What is with the press releases today?

:::

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