A Watch - from an OOP perspective

Date Arrow  July 13, 2008

A watch might be one of the most common types of objects, but it remains also one of the earliest pieces of human craftmanship to show an extreme level of complexity, all contained in a small amount of space. Since the late 1700s, artisan watchmakers in Switzerland and elsewhere have shown their pride and skills [...]

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Amazing Xcode

Date Arrow  May 29, 2008

Xcode is amazing. Of all the IDEs I’ve used (and this is, as always, a personal opinion, having used Visual Studio since version 6, Eclipse, Kdevelop and others) it’s the one I prefer. And today I found another reason to like it.
I’ve noticed this: when I use Xcode on a single-processor machine (such as a [...]

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ImageMagick

Date Arrow  May 28, 2008

ImageMagick is a cool toolkit; not only it’s a complete set of command-line applications, ported to Windows, Mac and Linux, supporting hundreds of different image formats, it’s also a C++ library that you can use in your own applications!
On Mac OS X, I installed it via MacPorts using the all-time classic:
sudo port install ImageMagick
Then I [...]

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On the Need of Minimalist Polyglots

Date Arrow  May 12, 2008

Many companies, at some point of their history, ask themselves a simple question: what programming language should I use? The answer to this question is tricky, and has big, big consequences, for every single line of code of your future products will be written, read and suffered by it. This single choice defines the level [...]

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Playing with HTTP libraries

Date Arrow  March 26, 2008

It’s fun to find out how to tackle the same task in different programming languages; in this case, it’s all about doing HTTP requests over a network: fortunately, there are networking libraries in virtually all major programming languages. In my current project, I’m generating wrappers easing the access to the core of the project itself, [...]

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iPhone SDK: Une Nouvelle Ere Démarre

Date Arrow  March 7, 2008

(Article publié sur Profession-Web)

Il y a de moments clés dans l’histoire de la technologie. Hier soir, vers 18h (heure suisse), il s’est produit l’un de ces moments. Apple a dévoilé un SDK (Software Development Kit) pour l’iPhone, et le monde du développement logiciel mobile ne sera plus jamais le même. Voici pourquoi.

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Null References

Date Arrow  March 7, 2008

There’s an interesting discussion going on these days on Ruby blogs about, basically, how to avoid one of the most common, annoying, easy-to-create bugs in any programming language: calling a method on a null reference (or pointer, depending on your language).

This single issue happens all the time, in garbage-collected and non-managed languages, static and dynamic, [...]

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Programmers are draftsmen

Date Arrow  February 10, 2008

Interaction08: IxD’s in Savannah; Alan Cooper:
Programmers are draftsmen. However, they are different than pre-industrial workers. They are self-directed and know better than managers what to do. They respect intelligence, not authority. You can’t tell them what to do, you can only coerce them. Their satisfaction comes from the quality of their work. Unlike pre-industrial craftsmen, [...]

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The Truth Be Told

Date Arrow  January 22, 2008

Reg describes 99% of all available programming jobs with incredible sincerity:
You do a clerk’s job, you settle for a clerk’s working conditions and wages, but you take solace in the thought that you are somehow more than a clerk, because you have a university degree and the dental technician who cleans your teeth doesn’t.
Only everyone [...]

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Erlang

Date Arrow  December 19, 2007

As I said before, I like to learn a new programming language every year. I also like to read at least 6 computing-related books every year, but the article about those 6 will come later.
The reason for these two rules is twofold: first, it gives me lots of material to blog about, and [...]

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