June 2007 - Posts

• A fragment of my computing past

  I was doing my usual Google Reader daily morning routine when I came across this site: http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/. In 1988 my dad just bought me a sparkling new PC XT clone. My classmate who owned an Atari 800XL (or was it XE?) computer showed me a copy of his COMPUTE! magazine, containing articles and BASIC/assembly source code for programs and games for various computing platforms of the era, notably the Apple ][, Commodore 64/128, Atari, Atari ST, Amiga, and the IBM PC. Needless to say, I got hooked. I spent countless hours typing in programs and studying the source code. I created a few games (i.e. rip-offs) of my own too. I had a classmate who frequented Angeles/Dau and he told me there was a store there that had dozens of old copies of COMPUTE! dating back to 1984. So I gave him three hundred bucks and he came back with a bag full of magazines. Bliss. A decade and a half later, whenever I go to my parents' house I would dig up my old copies and read them, show the game ads to my kids (remember Epyx and their Summer/Winter Games series?) and gawk at how innocent technology was back then. Ah, the memories... Posted Jun 19 2007, 01:16 PM by cruizer with no comments

• Predictable code

  In my early years of programming, performance was everything. These days, since I don't do system-level programming anymore, code maintainability is more important. Of course that doesn't mean to say that it's OK for my code to suck so many CPU cycles doing trivial things. It just means that it pays off better in the long run to have code that is easy to maintain/improve with good/average performance than to have blazing-fast software whose code is hard to understand (and is possibly buggy or will eventually have bugs). Jeremy Miller weighs in on putting code where you would expect to find it. This particular quote here caught my attention: I wouldn't want to live without ReSharper's CTRL-N shortcut to find any class in the solution (with wild cards too!). Then again, finding code with ReSharper will be a whole lot easier if you employ good naming practices and put code where you would expect to find it. That sounds just like the situation I had with a project in my previous company. The C# class files were stored in directories that did not match their namespaces. Good thing ReSharper was there, then again it's still much better to have predictable code and ReSharper at the same time. Posted Jun 12 2007, 07:55 AM by cruizer with 9 comment(s) Filed under: DotNET, C#, .NET, code