About Me
I'm your host, Bill Woody, a software developer in the Los Angeles area interested in all things software development related, from Mobile to embedded to client/server.
Category Archives: Commentary
And then it turns upside-down in an instant.
Cartifact is in the business of making print maps for high end real-estate companies, and I was brought in to help build a technical team, to make Cartifact a tech-oriented company in order to position it for an acquisition. But … Continue reading
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On Requirements Documentation.
After reading this article I just wanted to add my two cents. Documentation takes time to both write, read and communicate. Meaning if you write a 100 page specification for a software product, the developers are going to have to … Continue reading
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Musing on Advertising
So I’ve been giving some thought about advertising in general. After all, for the past three years I’ve been peripherally associated with advertising of one form or another — and all of it that particular breed of advertising called local … Continue reading
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I think part of the problem with CS educations today is the overuse of design patterns.
Okay, I know that probably irked a few people. But hear me out. A “design pattern” really is really just a common solution to a problem, right? I mean, if you have a problem like “how should I handle percolating … Continue reading
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Things I think about when starting a new project that, surprisingly, many people appear not to.
I switched projects at work and now I’m going through the struggle of trying to figure out how to build other people’s projects. It’s always a struggle, of course: a lack of familiarity always makes things harder than they should. … Continue reading
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*sigh*
How long before Facebook is back? I use Facebook for more personal posts and politically oriented stuff, and I use this blog for more technical-oriented topics. So clearly, Facebook is now down for my account, especially when I have a … Continue reading
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Little killers: channel abuse.
Channel abuse. When you use a magic value in a particular field (such as a text field) in order to signify something else. For example, if you use a magic text pattern (like ‘XXX’) to signify the last record. This … Continue reading
Posted in C++, Commentary, Java
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A surprising observation, or finding your own voice.
One thing that surprised me was the percentage of people who, on reading my code from my last post, took umbrage to the following line of code: if (null != (ret = cache.get(n))) return ret; (Okay, in all fairness, only … Continue reading
Posted in Commentary, Java
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Complexity–or how hard is it to display a list of 3,000 items in a table on MacOS X anyway?
The laptop on my desk can do around 2,403 MWIPS, around 100 times faster than the Cray X-MP/24 of yesteryears, and has easily more than 100 times the memory. (For reference, NASA clocked the Cray X-MP/24 at 25 MWIPS, and … Continue reading
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An interesting exercise.
So I’m developing this game in my spare time, and I needed a list of commonly used words. Downloaded the Project Guttenberg DVD of popular texts, an open source dictionary of words, and built a simple program which scanned the … Continue reading →