June 2008 - Posts

Can Software be Reliable?
27 June 08 05:21 PM | Avi Pilosof | 1 Comments   
Just read a post (permalink is broken) regarding how software engineering is nowhere near the level of quality as traditional engineering, partially because we don't have standards, regulations, etc. While I agree with some of the argument, people often Read More...
Trivial Physics Simulations (...in Silverlight) - Part 5
24 June 08 10:09 AM | Avi Pilosof | 0 Comments   
The finished product: I'm having trouble finding a way to embed the SL app inside this page, so let's see if this works (c'mon, skydrive!): CLICK HERE TO SEE THE APP IN ACTION. And download the solution from here: Taking it Further Particle systems are Read More...
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Trivial Physics Simulations (...in Silverlight) - Part 4
24 June 08 09:52 AM | Avi Pilosof | 2 Comments   
Tying it all together has zip to do with the physics simulation, but there are a couple of interesting bits which I'll paste into here. The rest you can grab from the solution that I'll post up; feel free to ask questions. The Game Loop The heart of the Read More...
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Trivial Physics Simulations (...in Silverlight) - Part 3
24 June 08 07:55 AM | Avi Pilosof | 3 Comments   
So now that we have vectors, we need to do something with them. We're going to use the concept of a Particle . This is supposed to represent a tiny object in our world that is affected by physics. For this reason, it has a position, velocity, acceleration, Read More...
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Trivial Physics Simulations (...in Silverlight) - Part 2
23 June 08 12:26 PM | Avi Pilosof | 2 Comments   
If you know how vectors work, this isn't going to be interesting. If you've never seen one before, I'll try to keep it simple. Keep in mind that throughout this post I'm talking in 2 dimensions. The same stuff applies for 3D work; you'd just add another Read More...
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Trivial Physics Simulations (...in Silverlight) - Part 1
23 June 08 11:34 AM | Avi Pilosof | 8 Comments   
Table of Contents: Part 1: Introduction to simple physics and vectors. Part 2: Details of the Vector2D class. Part 3: The Particle class and basic physics-based motion. Part 4: Tying it all together. Part 5: The finished product, and "what next...?" Introduction Read More...
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On Writing Safer APIs
19 June 08 01:08 PM | Avi Pilosof | 0 Comments   
Our team owns lots of smallish applications; all of them have a DB layer, an OM/API layer, logic and UI layers. What happens over time is that we have different people working on the same apps, switching between them over the course of time. This is great Read More...
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Programming Poker
18 June 08 12:37 PM | Avi Pilosof | 0 Comments   
A fascinating series of posts about how this guy built a bot to play online poker (for real money). This spans a gamut of programming topics from DLL injection, to screen scraping, to AI, to good OO practices... And it feel so cloak & dagger ; you Read More...
The Computing Client's Yo-Yo Diet
17 June 08 10:55 AM | Avi Pilosof | 1 Comments   
Thin, fat, thin, fat, thin, fat... Take a look at a simplified evolution of "The Client", as it's sometimes known: Terminal -> Mainframe (so thin...). At a time when computation was complex and expensive, there was little choice but to centralize it. Read More...
The Underhanded C Contest
16 June 08 03:02 PM | Avi Pilosof | 0 Comments   
Of course I've heard of the Obfuscated C Contest , but this is the first I've heard of the Underhanded one - so cool: http://underhanded.xcott.com/ The general theme of the contest is to write "sneaky" code that's difficult to spot at a glance. This year's Read More...
Buddy Knavery - The Killer Riffs
13 June 08 08:21 AM | Avi Pilosof | 1 Comments   
Some Silverlight goodness. My friend Darren wrote this amazing game that has strong ties to those 90's adventure games that I miss; Kings|Space|Police Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, etc. Writing a game engine is one thing, but doing all the artwork & Read More...
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LINQ doesn't have to be about databases...
12 June 08 06:33 PM | Avi Pilosof | 1 Comments   
I'm finally getting into the groove with LINQ and lambda expressions, and am over the initial skepticism I had regarding the feature. My initial reaction was based on using LINQ for DB access, and was along the lines of " Pfft. There's no way I'm embedding Read More...
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