Rants About Software

A new chapter in my career is beginning...

Starting soon, I'll be spending quite a bit of my free programming time doing contract work. Unfortunately, this means that I'll be spending less time on my personal projects, but I'm still looking forward to the experience.

Hopefully, this will also give me some new topics to talk (rant) about. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

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Full Image GalleryI was recently digging through a stack of photos when I came across some pics from an old project. During the Summer of '03, I built a PC inside of an old NES case (Your skill in nerdom has increased by +1).

Unfortunately, the photos were taken on a disposable camera, then scanned, so they're not the greatest quality. But still, I figured I'd share them here, as well as tell you all a little bit about the project.

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Updated on January 18, 2010 by Errornix

Updated on January 27, 2010 by Errornix

If the buzz is any indicator, Apple is getting ready to reveal iPhone OS 4.0, along with it's new tablet. Apparently, the new iPhone OS and the OS for the tablet will be very similar, so Apple has been hesitant to reveal the iPhone OS until the tablet has been revealed.

Before the new OS is revealed, I figured I'd post a few things that I would like to see Apple do.

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There's been a lot of talk lately about Real-Time Search. During the past few months, Google has added a real-time area to it's search results, Facebook and FriendFeed now retrieve real-time results, and new search engines devoted to real-time, such as Collecta, have sprung up.

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Last year I posted some New Year's Resolutions. So I thought it would be a good idea to quickly assess how well I did with them as well as make some new ones for 2010.

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We all saw this coming. After years of providing free web hosting services, Yahoo is finally closing the door on GeoCities.

Long gone are those nostalgic moments of doing a Google search only to find a geocities page (complete with an ugly tiled background, and animated gifs) that hasn't been updated in 10 years.

Before it went down, I managed to snap a quick screen shot of what was left of the original Memories of Hyrule page.

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The following code snippet is part of the PAUSE BUTTON implementation in a video game. The game is paused by setting Time.timeScale to 0 and it is unpaused by setting it back to 1.0.

if (GUI.Button(Rect(25,100,100,30),"PAUSE"))
{
    if (Time.timeScale == 1.0)
    {
        Time.timeScale = 0;
    }
    else
    {
        Time.timeScale = 1.0;
    }
}

The code is simple and straightforward. The solution is logically consistent with the way most people would naturally think through the problem. But is this the most efficient solution? With just a little more thought, one might come up with something similar to the following solution.

if (GUI.Button(Rect(25,100,100,30),"PAUSE"))
{
    Time.timeScale = 1.0 - Time.timeScale;
}

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My first iPhone App, Petter, is available in the App Store!

It took a bit longer to get out there than I had anticipated (about 2 months longer), but it's finally out and it's been quite a learning experience.

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