I’ve given this a little thought, and I’ve come up with six different activities people do on-line. These are only broad categories, and there is some overlap. But I think you can sum up what people do into the following six things: (a) Reading Information. That is, you go on-line to find information: the current [...]
I ran into an interesting problem while working on some code, and I thought it would probably be a good idea to, well, document the problem so I can remember it in the future. The problem was this: I have a C++ class which is the key index in a std::map class. This C++ class [...]
As I move from employee to self-employed software developer and attempt to build a company around my ideas, one central point sticks in my mind that I read from Paul Graham: if one is to succeed one has to make failure more costly. Not just in terms of wasted time or in terms of lost [...]
It’s rather simple, really. College age kids are not better programmers: age and practice generally makes you better, not worse. One doesn’t lose one’s ability to write code at 40 if one keeps on writing code from the age of 20: 20 years of practice is for any skill better than 2 years of practice, [...]
The other day a nice gentleman who had a hold of my business card contacted me with an idea for a web site that he wanted me to help develop and run. He thought it could be the next Craig’s list or the like: and while the idea was an interesting one, I told him [...]
One of the things that makes me happy about my alma matter is that they do not award honorary degrees. The highest award given is the “Distinguished Alumni” award, which, naturally enough, only go to alumni. At some point I’ve realized that the best professional social circles revolve around one’s alma matter–and given that they’re [...]
I’m spending a lot of time now with my new friend, the AppKit object NSOutlineView. Right now I’m trying to implement drag and drop, which is easy if you actually look for the documentation for NSOutlineViewDataSource, which, silly me, isn’t mentioned in the “Drag and Drop Programming Topics for Cocoa.” Instead, the documentation outlines how [...]
Upgraded blog to latest copy of WordPress. Broke theme. Not what I wanted to do today.
Every framework I have ever encountered, every API, Toolkit, or whatever, consists of (a) a specification, (2) an implementation, and (3) a whole bunch of bugs which require experience to understand and work around. In many ways one could say that the difference between one who is just learning a framework and one who understands [...]
Several months ago there was a flame war amongst many of the better read technical blogs, and from what I read in places such as Daring Fireball and Thought Palace was that Java sucked–and part of the reason why it sucked was that Java Swing sucked. By extension, of course, the Objective-C Application Framework was [...]