Programming

I recently stumbled on a new website, Eclipse Color Themes, and I’ve been enjoying browsing through the various themes. My favorite so far is the Gedit Original Oblivion by Sepehr Lajevardi. What really makes this theme stand out is that variables passed into a method are underlined. This lets you easily see with a glance where these variables are being used.

Comments are always failures? Followed by a post that explains why comments are failures, and what to do about it. The idea is simple, but requiring an article to explain it is a sign of failure, according to the idea.

I came up with my own phrase, which I believe makes the point clearer.

Comments indicate future refactoring.

There are multiple definitions to what software architecture is, notwithstanding that in some areas, the term cannot legally be used. Definitions vary from high level code design to organizational issues. James O. Coplien and Gertrud Bjørnvig came up with a good summary in Lean Architecture.

Over the last few months I've been working with Concordia's a href = "http://cartcgd.org/"CART CGD/a group, which is a group of computer art students who want to make video games. We did a few things called "game jams", which is where a group of people meet together and try and churn out a game in a few hours.

I have not written much C++ in my life. Most of it goes back to college and university, and that short period of time I was at Autodesk. However, I always considered the STL to be very influential. A few years back, I read Bjarne Stroustrup’s book and something hit me. For those not familiar with the STL, it’s a very template-intensive library that does not use much of the traditional interfaces you typically see in object oriented libraries. Instead, everything is based on duck typing.

A while back, my friend Yannick showed me that the source code for Return to Castle Wolfenstein had been made public.

The part that interested him the most was the way they (he knew the name of the developer, I forgot it, sorry) calculated square roots.

I’ll let you have a look at it first:

I've finally gotten fed up with using VB.NET as a scripting language at work, so I decided to try dropping an IronRuby interpreter into the system. It's fairly simple to do, I'll describe here how to build a REPL within your app.br /
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Step 1: Make a window for the REPL. Give it a box for your input and a box for your output. How you do all this is up to you, the interesting part is how to use Ruby within it.br /
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Step 2: Initialize the scripting engine.

pa href="http://nerderati.com/2010/09/perpetual-irc-the-multiplexer-edition/"Last time/a, we looked at how one could maintain a persistent session in IRC through the use of a terminal multiplexer (such as strongscreen/strong or strongtmux/strong) and SSH.

Now is the perfect time to stop using Stack Overflow unless my reputation score changes:br /
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I recently read a href = "http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2010/11/16/10091537.aspx"this article/a about how software metrics are mostly useless and tend to cause more problems than they solve. This reminded me of a topic in stats which apparently has some application in software development.br /
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The use of software metrics is an example of a statistical technique called instrumental variables. Often when you want to understand some phenomenon or relationship, you run into problems because many factors are iunobservable/i.