Just a quick message before I head out of town and away from technology for a few days:  If you’re having trouble playing any type of video file, just install FFDShow.  It basically plays everything.

For Labor Day weekend, Stephanie and I went to Lake Lure, NC with her parents.  We took a bunch of pictures while we were there, mostly of Chimney Rock.  Check them out!

You may notice when viewing my photos that it looks a little different.  I tried to make the text small enough that you see very little header before the photo, hopefully reducing the amount of scrolling you have to do if you aren’t running at a high resolution.  I also moved the timestamp down below the image, since most people probably don’t care about it.  It was a bit tricky to come up with an algorithm for determining the color of the header based on the color of the background, but I think I’ve come up with one that works fairly well.

If you have any comments about the new photos view, feel free to let me know.

Well it’s been a while since my last post, so for you, dear reader, I am making another.

The launch details of the Nintendo Wii were announced today:  November 19 at $250.  I’m a little disappointed.  I was really hoping for a $200 price point. Not that it matters, I’d get it either way, and they’ll probably drop the price next year (or maybe they’ll wait till 2008 for the first price drop I really don’t know).  And it’s bundled with Wii Sports, which... I don’t really care about.  The launch date also doesn’t mean much to me—I won’t be getting mine until December 25—but it seems like they should have beaten Sony’s launch date (on yours truly’s birthday) of November 17, especially since Nintendo (unlike Sony) can ship enough systems to meet demand.  But here’s my biggest disappointment:  getting a second controller (like, a fully functional one) is sixty dollars (forty dollars for Wiimote, twenty for the nunchuck attachment).  Sure, I’m still not going to be spending as much as I would on, say, a PS3 with no games or accessories or anything.  But as long as I’m going to have Wii Tennis I’d like to be able to play it with my wife, without having to spend more money on her controller than I would on a new game.

I apologize if my thoughts are overly disorganized.  I am feeling quite under the weather and debating whether or not I should tell my boss that I’m taking off the rest of the day as a sick day.  I’m certainly not in a state of mind for something requiring the level of concentration of, let’s say, refactoring a O(n²) algorithm down to a O(n) or O(n log n) algorithm (what I was working on before taking a ten minute break to blog).  But I’ve never taken time off for sickness and I probably won’t unless it’s the kind of sickness where I need to be in or near a sanitary bathroom for an extended period of time.

Just under one year ago I brought you an all-new design for this site.  If you preferred the old layout, or if you never saw it, now’s your chance to go back.  Just slap “?1point0” onto the end of just about any URL on my site.  There is now a better way to do this.

A few notes:

• 1point0 layout option is not persistent.  So clicking on any link in a 1point0 page will return to default layout.  This is something I will probably fix some day.
  Fixed

• Text-only layout takes precedence.  So if you are viewing a page in text-only layout, you will need to click that “view full graphics” link down at the bottom of the page before going into 1point0 view.
  Fixed

• As you might expect, there are a few rendering problems in Internet Explorer.  Nothing that makes the site unusable, but if you’re still using Internet Explorer you should really consider a better alternative anyway.

• I actually improved upon the original design, using only one table for layout purposes.  I’m sorry but the CSS trickery required to do equal-height columns that look right on all browsers is less intuitive and consistent than a table with two cells.  Sue me.

• It all validates, except that I need to replace strike tags with del tags.  I’ll save that for another day.
  Done

Note:  I have improved this in many ways.  See my next post for details.

I’m takin ya back to the old school cause I’m an old fool who’s so cool

Just wanted to make an update to my previous post:  I now have a layouts page, where you can pick the layout you want to view the site in.  I mean it’s no CSS Zen Garden, but I think I have a nice little infrastructure set up and it should be really easy for me to experiment with new layouts without throwing away the old ones.

If anyone out there is really bored, feel free to make a new layout for the site.  Not that I actually expect anyone to actually do that... but if you do and it looks decent, I’ll put it up...

A few weeks ago, I had to explain inheritance to someone who has been working with software for over a decade.  Sure, he may not have learned about inheritance back when he got his degree, and he may have spent some of his career in sales traveling around the world without writing code.  But for the last three or four years, his job—you know, the thing that pays for his kids’ food—has been to write and maintain Java code.  I expected him to have picked up on this whole object-oriented thing by now.  Since it’s a fundamental concept of Java and all.

Here’s a very simplified version of the code in question, formatted to be as brief as possible:

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class A {
  protected boolean isFooRequired() {  return true;  }
  public void doSomething() {
    if (isFooRequired())
      foo();
  }
}

I suggested he fix a bug by adding isFooRequired() to a subclass:

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class B extends A {
  protected boolean isFooRequired() {  return false;  }
}

He didn’t understand how the line “if (isFooRequired())” would know to call the isFooRequired() method in class B for an instance of B.  It’s called polymorphism.  Look it up.

That got me thinking about my own software development knowledge.  I work in a field where half of my technical knowledge will be obsolete in five years, and I have probably learned almost as much since graduating as I did in school, so how much good did my degree really do me?  A lot of what I know I have learned from websites and blogs for developers.  I guess they are kinda filling the niche that industry magazines used to fill.  In ascending order of usefulness, the sites I visit most would be The Old New Thing, The Daily WTF, A List Apart, and especially Joel On Software.  And please let me know if I’m missing out on any good ones.  So anyway I’ve learned a lot of things that they just don’t teach you at school, or that you would never want to learn in a classroom (i.e. having a test where they ask if you should require developers to write code in the interview would be dumb).  But there are many things that I wasn’t really taught, or that I was taught only through an elective.  Regular expressions have been extremely useful in my two years of professional programming, yet I only learned them in a one-hour Perl course.  I was never taught closures, and I only learned a functional programming language (Lisp) in an elective (Artificial Intelligence).  Not that I have ever used Lisp in the real world, but closures are nice and allow programmers to do some powerful things very easily.  Java and PHP kinda have things that are sort of like closures, but not really.  Perl has them, but I never write any code in Perl complex enough to need them.  I was never taught databases—I strayed from the databases elective since I knew that if I took it, I would list it on my resume, and I was afraid that listing the course would land me a job as a database administrator.  And I did not want to be a DBA.  In my software engineering course, we went over some concepts that are very important, but don’t really make sense to be tested on—it might have been more effective as a required series of lectures or something, provided the lecturers did a half-decent job.  I know I would have payed more attention that way.  Design patterns were covered in that course very briefly, although knowledge of them has been invaluable to me in the real world, and I was asked about them on nearly every job interview I went through.

I guess where I’m going with this rant is that I make an effort keep up with the latest and greatest.  It is something I am interested in (which is one of the reasons I chose to major in Computer Science in the first place), and it is vital to me being good at what I do.  Shouldn’t I expect others in this field to make at least a minimal effort to do the same?