#252 – February 25, 2018
Let’s add a photo mode to Wolfenstein II
I have a weird hobby: I like to take screenshots in games. Some call this activity game photography, and in a sense this is a bit like photography: composition, light, the things you have to deal with when taking photos in real life, are concepts you work with here as well. For photography you need a camera, and games in general present you with one, but there’s a problem: you aren’t going to be able to move and handle the camera however you please: it’s likely tied to the main character, there’s all kinds of info on the screen (Head Up Display or ‘HUD’) and the lens characteristics used are likely very wide (meaning: high Field of View (FoV) and low focal length).
I recently asked a coworker why a certain check was being done, and he answered with a shrug and said, “Just to be safe.” Over my career, I’ve seen a lot of code written just to be safe. I’ve written a lot of that code myself! If I wasn’t sure if I could rely on something, I’d add a safety check to prevent it from throwing an exception.
3D engine entirely made of MS Excel formulae
A computer science teacher once told us "a given computation can be achieved with any programming language, even spreadsheet formula". At first, as wise at it could have been, including Excel in the comparison sounded definitively stupid ... Thereafter, while studying Turing machine, it then sounded correct, yet not very fulfilling. Several years of experience with Excel, we will mostly remind Excel formula only are definitively limited with the lack of input/outputs. But, the set of problems that can be simply solved with formula only remain impressive.
Advantages of monolithic version control
With multiple repos, you typically either have one project per repo, or an umbrella of related projects per repo, but that forces you to define what a “project” is for your particular team or company, and it sometimes forces you to split and merge repos for reasons that are pure overhead. For example, having to split a project because it’s too big or has too much history for your VCS is not optimal.
IBM Java CTO: Devs shouldn't have to learn Docker, K8s, 30 other things to deploy an app
At IBM's Index developer conference in San Francisco, on Tuesday, The Register sat down with Big Blue's Java CTO John Duimovich to talk about the Java programming language, IBM, the cloud and other developer-oriented concerns. Duimovich made the case for IBM as a cloud platform partner, based on the company's Java expertise. He also argued for Java – 22 years old – as a vital, evolving language.