Random thoughts (#1)

Just some random notes, that are too short for their own entry, but still rather interesting:

• Stack Overflow - new initiative by perhaps two biggest celebrities in the programming blogging community - Jeff Attwood and Joel Spolsky (even if he insists he’s not blogging, just writing essays). In terms of marketing it’s blogging equivalent of Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson doing movie together. It’s also my first serious contact with podcasts. So far I’ve been reluctant thinking that I cant really be arsed to download 30mb then spend an hour listening to it. It was only recently that I realized I dont actually have to sit there and listen (yeah, I’m a little slow, be gentle). My commute time to work is about 25 minutes in the morning/25 minutes in the evening. That’s almost exactly one episode… I dont really have much experience with the stuff they talk about (web related things usually), but it’s quite interesting none the less. I enjoy it enough to become podcast fan and search for some other stuff, like Software Engineering Radio (directed to this one by Stack Overflow, actually). This whole initiative is meant to expand in the future, there’ll be place for Q&A section, a kind of knowledge exchange base for programmers.

• what do you need to upload some MP3s to your I-Pod? Well, you cant just copy it with Explorer (even if it can see I-Pod, just like any other storage device), that would be way too easy. Apple wants you to download 57MB of ITunes (I dont even want to guess how much does it take after installation)… This is from company that’s world famous for being user friendly, take notes, folks. Luckily, you can get Poddox for example, which takes 400k and can do the most important thing (uploading music) just as good as ITunes. Here’s list of other I-Pod managers, in case you’re allergic to bloatware like me. That’s a subject of its own actually, deserves a separate note, I may write it one day.

• need another proof that C++ is doomed? Imagine you want your class Foo to provide a standard way of testing if its objects are OK. For example:

  Foo foo;
  if (foo) { /* do something */ }

  It’s easy, right? Let’s just provide conversion to bool type. Well, what if we want it to be really safe? Piece of cake. Yep, 3 page article on this complicated topic.

• finished GTA IV. Man, what a game. You can easily forgive it most of its flaws, just because it’s so cool in overall. Much better than sum of its parts. It’s an action game, but it actually made me ponder my choices for much longer than Mass Effect for example. Bittersweet ending just tops it (and I love this new trend with movie-like credits…). Great job, Rockstar!