July 2008 - Posts

Code commenting? Try Business Commenting.
25 July 08 02:12 PM | Avi Pilosof | 16 Comments   

Jeff has a good post here about code comments and that they shouldn't be used as crutches: Coding Horror: Coding Without Comments I agree with the article, but one thing I rarely hear mentioned is that it's often more interesting to comment the business Read More...

Filed under: programming

Drawing Fractal Trees - Part 3
24 July 08 11:02 AM | Avi Pilosof | 1 Comments   

The Application Itself Firstly, here's what we're aiming towards: Live demo: Click to view live . Download the code: Screenshot: Writing The Application Now, when I originally wrote the bones of the app it was very simple; everything fit in the single Read More...

Filed under: silverlight, graphics

Turn down the ugly...
23 July 08 01:42 PM | Avi Pilosof | 0 Comments   

I've always struggled with making my apps look decent. In my head I can picture how it should look, but when it comes down to it, I often end up with stuff that looks like a dog's breakfast. Here's the cure: http://blogs.msdn.com/corrinab/archive/2008/07/22/8764478.aspx Read More...

Filed under: silverlight, ui

Drawing Fractal Trees - Part 2
19 July 08 02:06 PM | Avi Pilosof | 0 Comments   

L-Systems We've established that drawing the tree will use the concept of self-similarity. To put this in action, we're going to use what's called an L-System . Here's a crash-course... Firstly, we establish that we have a "pen" that at any Read More...

Filed under: silverlight, graphics

Drawing Fractal Trees - Part 1
19 July 08 12:02 PM | Avi Pilosof | 1 Comments   

Table Of Contents Part 1: Basic fractal theory (this page) Part 2: L-Systems - drawing trees . Part 3: Implementation in Silverlight, live demo, code download . A Brief Explanation of Fractals In plain English, a fractal is a shape whose constituent parts Read More...

Filed under: silverlight, graphics

[The Global] War On Terrier
17 July 08 12:46 PM | Avi Pilosof | 2 Comments   

I mentioned in the last series of posts that I'd written a small Silverlight game for an internal competition. Well, I'm finally able to put it online, here it is: http://silverlight.net/samples/2b2/waronterrier/waronterriertestpage.html It's very similar Read More...

Filed under: games, silverlight

Australia is going to France!
08 July 08 11:59 AM | Avi Pilosof | 0 Comments   

(Bonus points for misleading title) The Australian Team SOAK just made it into the finals of the Imagine Cup. They were one of the 6 teams chosen in the Software Design Category. This year's theme was "The Environment", and Team SOAK has written software Read More...

Filed under: programming

It's all just a clock measuring contest...
04 July 08 09:13 AM | Avi Pilosof | 6 Comments   

Did you know that SBCL is now faster than Java, as fast as Ocaml, and getting better ?! What does this mean for you? Most likely, nothing. They have various benchmarks that are used to measure the speed of a language implementation; and I think it's a Read More...

Filed under: architecture, programming