07 Mar 2006
I’ve been doing object-oriented programming and design since 1994. Most of that work has been centered on Objective-C, with a bit of dabbling in Smalltalk quite some time ago, occasional forays into Java, and increasingly more Python during the past few years. During the past year, I’ve finally had a reason to get deep into a project with C++, and now I know what I’ve been missing: A heap of nasty syntax and inflexibility, that’s what!
Don’t get me wrong, C++ is definitely a lot more powerful than just plain old C, and you can do some clever things with its templates and some other language features (with the caveat that in doing these clever things, you are relying heavily on the compiler doing lots of things that are far from explicit in the code, which is quite different from standard C). My main gripe with C++ is that the object-oriented constructs it provides are really very not suited to the practice of object-oriented programming as it stands today (which may be a subject of future postings here).
On a whim, I recently googled
"worst object oriented language", and got some interesting results. This query produced 103 results, which Google whittled down to just 12 after removing what it thinks are probably duplicates. Four of those were essentially the same quote from one article, pasted into different contexts, while the other eight seemed to be unique utterances. In
all of these cases, the language being described was
(drumroll, please…) yes, C++. At least I’m not alone in feeling this way.
Read on →
17 Feb 2006
My pal <a target=“_blank” href =“http://peoplesflag.blogspot.com/”>James tipped me off to the existence of <a target=“_blank” href =“http://www.pandora.com”>pandora, which lets you create your own streaming virtual radio station, continually feeding your head with music you like, often things you had never heard of and wouldn’t have guessed you would like! The way it works is that you tell pandora the names of some bands you like, and it uses that as a basis to begin choosing songs that it thinks you will like. The “editors” at pandora have listened to thousands of albums, categorized their content by assigning attributes based on the sounds, and put it all in a database. So, if you start off by entering Tiny Tim as your favorite artist, presumably you’d get a stream full of artists who sing falsetto, or play ukelele, or both. [note to self: create Tiny Tim-based pandora station and see what happens]
To top it off, the virtual stations you create can be shared with others! I now submit for your listening pleasure my first pandora-station: <a target=“_blank” href =“http://www.pandora.com/?sc=sh12811124”>rock bastard. It gave <a target=“_blank” href =“http://peoplesflag.blogspot.com/”>James a headache; hopefully you’re made of harder stuff.
Read on →
10 Feb 2006
A few weeks ago, I became the proud owner of an
iPod Nano. It now accompanies me everywhere. Whether I’m commuting, coding, or cooking, chances are I’ve got my preciousss in a pocket or otherwise on my person.
The only downside is that the shiny black surface gets scratched insanely easily! When
reports first came out about this last fall, I figured it was the whining of some perfectionists. But now that I’ve got one myself, I’ve seen the light (and the scratches). I’ve carried cellphones around for years without this kind of scuffing. I used one phone from June 2003 to December 2005, and that phone looks better than my iPod did after just a week of use! During that week, I either carried it in a soft jacket pocket containing nothing else than the iPod and the headphones, but the surface looks like I’ve been dragging it behind a car.
Fortunately, I’m a pragmatic person, and I don’ t much care how my devices
look, as long as they do what they’re supposed to. Unfortunately the scratching was beginning to mar the display as well, so I decided to buy some protection in the form of an
iSkin Duo. This is a dual-layer silicone “condom” for the iPod. It comes in a range of color combinations, most of them brutally ugly. I chose the brown/orange combo, which I would classify as only “moderately ugly”. A hard transparent plastic bit covers the screen, while the click-wheel is covered by a single layer of silicone and an optional thin plastic bit to make the wheel a little smoother. All in all, I’m really happy with this:
- I can toss my iPod into a pocket without worrrying that it’s scratching up even more.
- The silicone skin makes it a little less slippery, therefore easier to grab and more difficult to drop.
- The ugliness may prevent would-be thieves from even recognizing the iPod for what it is.
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17 Jan 2006
Did I release the very first third-party screensaver for Intel Macs? It seems like it! I released the latest version of the Mister Hankey Screensaver way back in November, compiled as a Universal Binary so that it would work on Intel Macs. I didn’t have access to a developer Intel Mac, so I had a friend try it briefly and verify that it worked.
Now that Intel Macs are actually available, I checked versiontracker’s
Mac Intel page to see what else was out there. Imagine my surprise when I found only five other Mac Intel screensavers there, all of them released in the past couple weeks! Google can’t seem to find anything else, either.
So, as far as I can tell,
Mister Hankey is the first screensaver ever released for Intel Macs by a third party. Hooray!
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16 Jan 2006
Just read a mercifully short interview with Noam Chomsky. I say “mercifully short” because, as much as I admire the old guy, lots of his writings tend to be long and dense. Good to see a bite-sized piece for a change.
Some salient bits:
A large majority of the population is in favor of a national health care system of some kind. […] But whenever that comes up […] it’s called politically impossible, or “lacking political support,” which is a way of saying that the insurance industry doesn’t want it, the pharmaceutical corporations don’t want it, and so on.
[…] we are under a rigid doctrine in the West, a religious fanaticism, that says we must believe that the United States would have invaded Iraq even if its main product was lettuce and pickles, and the oil resources of the world were in Central Africa. Anyone who doesn’t believe that is condemned as a conspiracy theorist, a Marxist, a madman, or something.
What gives me hope actually is public opinion. Public opinion in the United States is very well studied, we know a lot about it. It’s rarely reported, but we know about it. And it turns out that, you know, I’m pretty much in the mainstream of public opinion on most issues.
Pass it along to your conservative friends!
Read on →