Hills House of GAIN

I’ve seen a couple of posts , the first by Jeff Atwood about what can you build in  600 lines of code and a response from Charles Petzold commenting that 600 lines is a luxury.

Heh. 600 Lines. That really was a luxury. Back when I first started out in the games industry, for fun and a bit of friendly competition we used to write games that must be close to 256 BYTES as possible.

So, the other night I took a quick trip down memory lane and dug out my old source code, and by old I mean old. When I unzipped the code, I swear the monitor turned sepia. This stuff is from the days when 4Mhz PC’s cost more than most cars,CD’s were still a twinkle in Philips’s eye, and Norton Tools was indispensable. Ok, so it was only 1989, but it still feels old!

Anyway, sifting through the files I could only find two examples of my 256 Byte games (and one from a friend) but I’ll present them below for your amusement.

They’re written in 8086 assembly, yep, those are real 16 bit registers 😉 And the tool of choice was TASM, back when Borland produced real tools, rather than the bloated Java crap they’re peddling today.

First up is Pacman. Running these relics in a window means the code to sync to the vertical refresh doesn’t work too well! I had to fire up a VM because they wont run at all on my Vista64 install. Anyway, the ghosts move randomly rather than tracking you, but there is collision detection against the walls. Come on, what do you expect for 256 bytes?

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I was having a deep discussion with a friend the other day, about how WPF and Winforms controls can’t overlap on the same surface. It’s not really a big limitation, since WPF is so rich you’d never need a Winform Control on your surface, right?

What if you really , really wanted a nice Google map or a Live! map on your WPF form? well I guess you’re S.O.L. then.

Well, up until now!

Yep, that’s a Microsoft Live map right there on your WPF form. Ok, I know its not overlapping , so you’re thinking I could have faked it.., but I haven’t honest, its just in a <StackPanel> as an example.

Anyway, here’s how it works.

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Image via Wikipedia

As a long time lover of ReSharper, I finally got round to upgrading to the new 3.1 version, but I came across a minor problem after the install, ReSharper wasn’t appearing in the VS2008 IDE :(.

So after a quick Google it appears you need a specific incantation when you install on a machine with both versions of Visual Studio installed :

msiexec /i ResharperSetup.3.1.Full.VS80.msi VSVERSION=9.0

hey presto, we’re in business. ReSharper appears on the inside VS2008’s menu bar once more!

The next issue I had wasn’t really a problem with resharper but its built in unit test runner didn’t support MbUnit natively. Enter Albert Weinert , who has created a very nice ReSharper plugin to allow you to run your MbUnit tests right in the IDE using ReSharper’s test runner! I don’t think I’m the only one salute you Albert with each press of f5 🙂

Albert’s Blog links to the latest version of his DLLs.

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There’s been lots of occasions where I’ve seen something in the US, but the company doesn’t ship to the UK. Also , with the current exchange rate and weak dollar we’re getting a really good deal on consumer goods, especially nice, expensive consumer goods.

Mmmm Nice HALF PRICE consumer goods! If only I could get them here!

Well, now you can! By signing up with the myus site , you can grab yourself a US postal address without living there. The myus people will then ship what ever is delivered back to your REAL address in the UK.

Ok, you have to pay the sign up fees, and the shipping charges are measured in chunks of 100g, but if you’re shipping something fairly light but expensive, it easily works out cheaper than buying in the UK

Right, I’m off to find a nice blu-ray player, now that the war between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is all but over.

A change is as good as a rest, so they say, so I’m off for an interview as Team lead for the Labour Market Data Warehousing Team. I haven’t really had that many interviews in the course of my career, as I don’t tend to move around much at all. I’ve worked for only 3 companies in the last ~23 years, only moving around within those companies, so being in the hot seat is something of a novelty.

In the past, however, I have been in a position to do technical interviews , so I think this puts me at an advantage, compared to people who are only ever on the receiving end of the interview process.

As a technical interviewer I’d be looking for a few key things.

• Initial appearance.
  Whilst suits aren’t a necessity , effort however is. If you turn up looking like you’ve just been shovelling manure, don’t expect much sympathy. Smart casual is ok, buy if your position is facing the customer, make sure you have at least one decent suit.
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Ok, so maybe I’m just too trusting, but the having all your feeds inside Outlook2007 seemed like the smart thing to do. All the incoming data in one place. Seems sensible at first, no?

Well, it is, kind of, until you need anything more than the simple management tools that come with a right click of the mouse. I had over a hundred feeds, some dead, some very much alive, and having to delete them one by one with a right click is a touch annoying, when the tree view that the feeds live in doesn’t support multiple selection.

Even more annoying is the lack of export for the folder structure I had created to bring some kind of order to the chaos. I exported the feeds to OPML, and then imported them on my laptop, and to my dismay, all I ended up with was a flat list of feeds.

So , given the lack of management tools for even the simple operations like deleting more than one feed at a time, I’m opting for a stand alone reader. A little more inconvenient maybe, but more usable, almost certainly.

So, onto the web, and it seems like I’m spoiled for choice! After trying and abandoning Google reader, I decided that i really need a client based application rather than something that’s hosted. I simply can’t get on with the web interface for these things, I really do like my right mouse button for context, something which is mostly lost when you switch to a web based solution. Although you can access your feeds from anywhere, there are other solutions that provide this , so that’s no real loss.

Eventually it boils down to a couple of client choices, I’m sure there are more clients available but i don’t want to spend 3 days choosing the next tool! So the two clients I’ve tested are FeedDemon and SharpReader, both are listed high in the search results, and both have won various magazine awards, so i think they’re a pretty safe bet for quality, stability and usability.

After a couple of hours use playing with both, I think FeedDemon has the edge. It feels more polished and its definitely the more feature rich of the two clients. Also , signing up for a free NewsGator account means that you can synchronise your feeds between clients!

So FeedDemon it is then. I’ll post more when i’ve lived with it for a few days !