Today I got to code to solve a problem. The Army’s bit of code which moved flight records from the maintenance database into the pilot records database broke, and I got to write a replacement. It’s trivial code, really: take a fairly complex SQL join generated by MSSQL, and write its results to an XML [...]
It was an interesting night: I was at a B-Boying (breakdancing for those not down with the slang) competition. As a second date, it was quite fun; as an event to photograph, it was a challenge; as a skill, it was intimidating. More images here, at the flickr set. Statistics, because I am a nerd: [...]
3.0 is finally out. Go get it. Say you took all the programming languages I have ever encountered and put them into a table. If you were to assign a column to ease of use, a column to language power, and a third column to the product of the previous two columns, then reverse sort [...]
Microsoft just released another .NET language: Small Basic, designed to get MS back into the business of teaching programming. I have to laugh at parts of the release document. For example, the claim that programming languages started simple and easy to learn, and that the high-level concepts of modern languages discourage people from learning to [...]
I’ve had a little utility for quite some time now that I use mainly to let the iTunes’ current song play through its end, then stop. It’s one feature from Winamp that I couldn’t deal without. Quite recently, I upgraded to iTunes 7.7. My little utility stopped working. When I finally got around to looking [...]
Subtitle: The good, the bad, and the… no, wait; this is a Google project. XML and Java have the same sort of flavor to them: they’re reasonably good and very widely used; they’re the sort of product that design committees everywhere aspire to create. Their flaws only really become visible after something better comes along. [...]
It’s not very much*, but it represents my first tentative steps towards doing something visual with PyGame. “But,” you object, “what happened to that C++ project you were working on?” Basically, I got bored**. I have a fairly high tolerance for doing background research before jumping into a project, but the sheer volume of required [...]
I’m trying to remain enthusiastic about C++. I’ve been pushing through the books, trying to gain enough fluency to start pushing forward on a real project. Every once in a while I’d run across something weird, like the necessity of explicitly writing a copy constructor and overloading the assignment operator of any non-trivial class, but [...]
Expressed here as a tag cloud. The source code itself is nothing special; it’s just an easy way to test my knowledge of C++ as it grows.
I check out of the Basic Combat Skills phase of flight training this Thursday, and have an expected wait of several months before I start training in whichever advanced aircraft I end up with. Naturally, a project was spontaneously created to fill the anticipated upcoming free time. In this case, the project is to learn [...]