Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (Kindle version) is a book that my wife gave me awhile back, and to which I finally got around to reading. It’s a bit of a strange book – it purports to challenge existing dogma about the origins of modern English, but does so in a manner that seems too casual …
Author Archives: user
The Xbox (1) Live Shutdown and Secret Weapons Over Normandy
A few months ago, Microsoft announced that it would be shutting down the Xbox Live service for the original Xbox on April 15, 2010. I haven’t played an Xbox 1 Live game in years, but this news still makes me a little wistful, because for the first time something that I’ve worked on will essentially …
Continue reading “The Xbox (1) Live Shutdown and Secret Weapons Over Normandy”
Thoughts on Dragon Age
I’ve been meaning to write this up for awhile, since I beat the game a month or two ago, but only just now got around to it. I quite enjoyed the first 10 or 15 hours, tolerated the next 35 or so, and then slogged through the last 20. I would say that once the …
More about debugging.
One of the blogs that I have on my feed list recently reposted this tidbit: There are only two debugging techniques in the universe: printf. /* */ Since I recently posted my own little list of some debugging techniques, I can’t resist weighing in on this assertion. While their list is a bit flip, changing …
Me and Google
Two unrelated stories: We’ve both recently been the target of hacking attempts originating from China. Of course, the attack they suffered was much more serious and alarming than mine, which appeared to be a bot trying to log into my wireless router (running Tomato) and was mindlessly trying every entry in a password dictionary. I …
Debugging!
Here’s another Reddit stub dealing with a topic that is near and dear to my heart: debugging! Unfortunately, the comments on that article seem to focus more on the “fuzzy” aspects of debugging – the “go home and mull it over while watching TV” kind of stuff, rather than more concrete debugging techniques. Whenever I …
First Chance .NET Exception Handling
I saw this article posted on Reddit’s programming feed*, which talks about a Visual Studio debugging technique for getting first crack at exceptions, before any upstream handlers run. The Debug->Exceptions dialog can be used to set the debugger to break before any exception handlers fire for a particular exception. This is useful not only for …
Overdue…
It’s time for the standard “I’ll try to update more often” post. Seriously!
Windows 7 on my netbook
I decided to try running Windows 7 Ultimate on my netbook (an Asus EEE PC), since I had heard that it was nearly as fast as XP (and much more modern). I installed it by burning the ISO (acquired by virtue of being an MSDN subscriber) and then booting the netbook from an external DVD …
Using GPPG and GPLEX with Visual Studio
Here’s a quick note on a problem I ran into awhile back. I was using the GPPG and GPLEX parser tools as part of a Visual Studio project – the input files for these tools generate C# source files which are then compiled into the project. However, I noticed a problem with the recommended project …