doomkeeper

Yes on the 3rd of May 2009, I finished my first half Marathon. My time was about 2 hours 20mins, which is quite slow. But includes 15mins of waiting in the lineup for the bathroom stalls, so really it was more like 2hours. Would you believe they only had two stalls?! There was about 6000 people I think that ran. Maybe that 4 pints of water before I started wasn’t such a good idea.

Would I do it again? Well maybe… but I now I know I can do it I feel like trying something else. Maybe a full marathon, maybe a triathalon. Maybe just some cycling. Whatever I chose I’m impressed that I have started down the road of doing fitty things.

Victoria my better half also did the half Marathon and quite enjoyed herself. Maybe we can find something else we can do together. I also have a friend in the UK that has been inspired by what I’ve been doing and is also doing a half marathon. He suggested maybe doing a full together next year. So that’s a possibility. Maybe in New York or Chicago.

I managed to get free entrance into another half marathon in June here in Vancouver. I haven’t signed up yet, but its tempting.

Frankly it’s also nice to get my Sundays back again. And it’s now BBQ season and I write this as I’m sat on our balcony over looking false creek and it’s lovely and sunny.  So I think a little relapse into burnt food and bright red suntans is in order.

Well a half Marathon really. And let me tell you that’s pretty damn amazing for me. I have to be the least likely to run person you are bound to meet anywhere. Seriously! I used to skip every gym class possible, with as many exotic excuses as I could think of.   “The cat ran off with my PE kit miss.” “My mum says I’m allergic to the air miss!” Jumpers for goal posts were never my thing.

I am about as fast as an Asthmatic Ant, with some heavy shopping. (thank you Blackadder).

Also I haven’t run ANY distance since I was knee high to a grasshopper.

I managed to run 10k on Sunday which was actually much easier than I was expecting.

You might be wondering what on earth made me want to do such a thing. Well it’s for a very good cause; The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, raising money to treat and cure Cancer. Pretty much everyone I know has been touched by Cancer in some way, so it’s very nice to be able to something to help. Also my girl is a Mentor this year. She has done the event before and they have invited her back to help others. Wow she’s pretty good.

It’s on May 3rd, which is very nearly my birthday. So please this year rather than get a pipe and slippers set from the Woolworth’s closing down sale, donate something on my page.

Here is my donation page.

Anyway I’ll report back my progress here with some photos when I get some.

This is such a common problem now.

By this I mean how common it is for engineering colleagues to go diving into C#, thinking they already know the language inside out.

The familiar C++ style syntax, the convenience of intelisense and WYSIWYG style editors.

The smug, naive notion that they can add yet another language to their dusty resume and think how easy it was to pick up.

I remember a C++ programmer telling me… “You’ll never have trouble finding work again… now that you’re an established C++ programmer”. This kind of arrogance runs wild in the industry. Frankly I’d hang my head in shame if ever I felt this way. They honestly believe it’s the pinnacle of their education. C# being just a dumbed-down, high level, subset of C++. And they can happily hack their way through until ‘it just works’.

My companies tools set is literally littered with these kind of ‘applications’. Owners long since abandoned them, waiting for the next tech bandwagon to leap in front of. Illusions of grandeur clouding their every judgment,  as they salivate at scrambling one step higher up the ladder.

End users don’t seem to care. In fact they seem to encourage the rapid development of  these fisher-price, my first app, style tools. It’s only the next poor developer that has to come and wade through the buckets of misunderstood ideologies that feels this pain. Often it’s several iterations of developers later that someone who actually knows what they are doing gets burdened with the task of maintenance. At this point it’s been gang banged into such a state that starting from scratch would be so much easier.

If only they understood basic design patterns. I mean even basic MVC isn’t that hard is it?  No, no, no lets interwind the whole lot and celebrate doing it.

What will the next one be? WPF? It seems to be spreading like wildfire. I wonder how many of them right now are hacking their way through the API, expecting to be patted on the head for being the first to do so on their team.

Is it fear of being left behind? Tempted by the pretty lights?

I’m also learning new languages, but I’m reading as much literature as I can on the subject. Asking respected veterans for their opinions and advice on the matter. The creators of C# and WPF had certain design philosophies; things that didn’t work that they have improved from previous iterations. To not align with them and embrace their ideas, through sure ignorance is like pissing in the wind.

It should reflect badly on the developer in a review process, but it doesn’t. Why? Should the reviewers attitude be, to punish a pioneers efforts to learn new technologies? Perhaps, if they do so in such a cavalier fashion. Well, no manager/lead I’ve met would like to do that. Maybe they respect them enough to believe they’ll do it right way.

Most mangers have also abandoned such selfish and career fueling drives such as this however, so they often know very little about the subject matter. Content to allow their underlings to spread their and wings and allowing such practices to continue. Certainly at my work, C# is still (generally) a non-senior engineer skill.

So how can someone with no knowledge of a technology effectively critique someone? It’s very difficult…

1. Insist on courses and read lots books / online literature.
2. Do not allow C++ programmers who “think they know”.
3. Teach high level ideologies first, syntax later.
4. Stay on top of your game. You need to at least know vocabulary if you don’t learn the technology.
5. Hire experts and learn from them!

I’m certainly not an expert myself, but I know that just following these simple steps you could prevent the maintenance nightmare that I’ve recently inherited.

Again I hope this generates some discussion.

Nothing earns you geek points more than using an editor like Vim or Emacs.  Frankly the contrary is also true if you stoop as low as using Visual Studio. I work with a number of people who look down their nose when they see me using VS.  With green text on black trying to look all retro, smug in the knowledge they are so much cooler than me.

Ok I know, I’m probably fighting a losing battle here. As the likes of Vim and Emacs run on every platform known to man and they are very extenible. Everyone loves to hate M$ etc.

To give you a  bit of background; I used emacs for 14 months while working exclusively on HP Spark / Dec alpha machines in good old fashion UNIX. I wrote a few Lisp scripts for emacs, but nothing special. I did learn to love it and I found using VS afterwards almost like playing with a toy. No developer worth anything would ever consider using VS. You’d be laughed at by any level of unix / level programmer and quite rightly so.

Anyway, that was 8 years ago and things have changed. I still do a lot of C++ development, but I also do .NET languages such as C#.

Now the reason I can’t leave VS is ultimately Visual-Assist. I love it! To be without it I now feel disabled as a programmer.

Visual-Assist for all that don’t know is essentially ‘intelisense’ on steroids. It’s made by WholeTomatoe software and it’s fantastic.

I often sit there being asked by my trendy friends where various code lives. They’ll have a class name, and simply want to look up the definition. I’d forgotten how brilliant Visual assist is with symbols. ALT+G on a symbol and it jumps straight to the code definition. Watching my Vim buddies work… well it’s regular expression followed by, calling grep or something like that. Vim doesn’t do any symbol parsing or anything, so if you’re looking for horribly generic fuction like Update(), you’d have a hell of a time finding it.

This having the symbols correctly parsed is so handy for refactoring too. Want to rename a class, no problem. It correctly scopes all changes so it’s infinitely better than a blind and brutal a reg-exp. Change a functions params? Visual Assist will change all calls to this and replace them correctly.

I have become so reliant on it, it shapes my want to learn other languages. Looking up APIs is a waste of time and is frankly tedious.

So is this a bad thing? Have I become simply lazy in my reliance on this tool? Or has my productivity increased so much that anything else seems like a waste? Maybe so.

Now I know I’ll be told that there exists a VIM plugin for visual studio, so I can have the best of both worlds. Well perhaps… But I guess that’s not my point. My point is without realising it, I’ve become so reliant on a tool that I can’t contunue without it. I draw a parrallel with mobile phones here as I belive it’s a good analogy.

Do you remember all your phone numbers now? No? Well of course mobiles phones remember them all for you. Has that made you worse as a telphonist? Perhaps? Would you feel crippled if you were faced with a phone with no numbers? Or have you accepted that it’s a the future and embrace being lazy and use the phones memory. Well I believe this is exactly the same as learning an API back to front. Relying on the compiler to find your syntax errors is simply way too old school now.

Anyway, I hope this generates some discussion. Please let me know your feelings on the matter I will be quite interested to hear peoples oppinions.

Babies on planes…

Why on earth does someone bring a baby on a plane? It’s not really going enjoy the trip, so why the douche have you dragged the poor little bugger with you. Aren’t there baby kennels that you check the little sods in with? It seems to be that everywhere I sit on any airline, bar the really budget ones (perhaps people are too scared to take their kids on them), there are screaming kids near by.

Now my theory. And I may have ripped this off from a comedy skit I saw. Since all the terror attacks, various things have been banned from airlines. Liquids for example. Shoes are even taken off and scanned these days. If someone gets caught with a “suspect baby”, then all the airlines will ban babies from the flights and we’ll all be happy.

People putting their seat back!!!

Ok. I find this the height of rudeness. I don’t give a monkeys if the seat goes back, check with the person behind you at the least. I’ve normally got my laptop on the table and end up eating the screen when some ignoramus in the front feels the need to recline. Damn them, damn them all.

Baggage claim!

Ok. I’m normally first there and last to leave. Why is always my bag that gets lost? Fallen off the conveyor and left at destination are two of my recent favorites. I wonder how many bags get lost every day? Boxes with fragile written down the side slide down the carousel and plonk into one another. Is this normal? I’m I the only one that’s horrified by this?

Seems like a life time since my last update, so many things it’s difficult to know where to begin.  Seems a little ridiculous having a blog when you don’t use it.  So hopefully this post will be followed by more. Maybe even of some substance.

Firstly I’ve just finished work on Need for Speed Undercover.  It was my first game here in Canada and I think I’m quite proud of my part; the Audio.  This was my main excuse for not blogging as we have been very busy for months finalling the game.  Anyway it’s all done now… you should all run out and buy it of course

I have a met a lovely girl named Victoria. She has been keeping me on the straight and narrow.  She’s 28, gorgeous, clever and fit as a fiddle.  Would you believe I’m considering running for a Triathlon? She did one back in March and thinks I can do it easy. In triathlon terms it’s nothing (400k, 11k, 5k).  But for me it’s a challenge. The cycling and swimming parts I think I’ll be fine, but running is my weakest link. I run like a cross between a chicken and giraffe. Think I gave up illusions of grandeur after the egg and spoon race age 3. Trust me it’s not a pleasant site. A visit to the treadmill is in order.

We went to Seattle for Thanksgiving and cooked a Chicken. Well we cheated a little and bought a cooked Chicken, but we did the rest. Seattle is actually really nice and you can certainly get a lot more for your money down there in terms of Condos. Didn’t get to see Microsoft, but there’s always next time.

Also visited Toronto the other day for the first time. Saw Niagara, truly amazing to see. The town around it however is very much like a Blackpool / cheap Las Vegas however. Very Americanized. All you can eat buffets and Casinos at every turn. The area around it, Niagara on the Lake, is much nicer. Known for it’s Ice Wine (very sweet desert wine), there’s loads of Wineries near by that give you tasting tours. I recommend this to everyone Went up the CN tower too. It’s not the tallest structure in the world anymore, but it’s still damn tall.  147 stories I think. Try standing on the glass floor at the top with a hangover.

Ohh! Nearly forgot to mention. Went diving, for the first time in nearly a year. Victoria had done her PADI open water course so we could go together. We went to a place called Porteau Cove, which is near Squamish here in BC. Beautiful place surrounded by mountains. Anyway, was fully expecting Victoria to hate it and me to love it, but as it happens the complete opposite happened. I couldn’t equalize, had too much weight and had absolutely banging headache when I was finished. Victoria one the other hand was a complete natural. The whole incident has put me off a little bit, but not to be defeatist I’ll give it another go soon, to make sure I’m not really that crap.

Anyway, that’s a Whistle-stop tour of what I’ve been up to the last few weeks.

Hope to have some more post for you all soon.

“the only rabbit around here is the one inside your head working the controls.” - Father Ted.

Right, by AutoPilot I mean the little man inside your head that generally does your daily routine while you ponder other more important things. You know what I mean, the instinct to always put something back in your pocket without thinking about it. This bloke also surfaces when you’ve had way too much to drink and steers you home.

The reason I mention this is because recently it appears that mine has got bored and likes to amuse himself by causing havoc in my life.

Firstly one of my neighbors left their tap running and the floor above my apartment flooded. I couldn’t believe how stupid someone could be to do such a thing. I then promptly did the same myself and flooded my kitchen.

Then just the other morning I was getting ready to go to work and misplaced my iPOD. I tore the place apart before and after work. I even asked the security in the building if anyone had handed it in. Nothing. Days past by and I began to resign to the fact it had been stolen. Then I found it placed in my wardrobe!

The last one really takes the biscuit. I fell asleep at a friends house after a evening out. He luckily lives in the same building as me so this isn’t a big deal at all. Or so I thought… I awoke to find myself wondering around OUTSIDE my building, with no shoes, jacket or keys! Turns out I must have stumbled (sleep walking perhaps) to the elevator without collecting my keys, tried to go to my floor, found that I couldn’t without my keys. I then had gone to the only floor I could, ground! Nobody was about so I think I decided to walk outside! Unbelievable.

I can’t tell you how scary it was to wake up walking around outside with no shoes on. Truly astonishing. I managed eventually to plead with the concierge to let me back upstairs to get my keys. But only after a long drawn out conversation about why anyone would be that stupid.

The little bastard has now made me so paranoid I’m checking everything twice and sometimes three times.

Moral to the story. Wear a set of keys around your neck. Add a GPS tracking device to all expensive electronics and continually check the taps!

Recently I was talking about coding competitions with someone at work and it got me thinking about the demoscene again…

For those of you that do not know the demo scene is a collection of people “sceners” throughout the world that build “demos”. A demo could be considered to be very much like a music video, but where all the graphics are done in real time. These demos are shown at demo parties, where they are judged in a competition. There are different restrictions which will ultimately decide the type of the demo, such as 1k, 4k, 64k and unrestricted. The demo scene is basically a playground for future games programmers and has some of the best programmers on earth.

Why tell us all this Jimmy? Well… the demo scene is very dear to me as it’s what ultimately started me on this path of making videos games. I was so involved that I organized and hosted the last big UK demo party “dejavu 2k“, which was held at my university in Leicester.

Unfortunately the UK was a very quiet place for demos in those days and after university I lost all touch with the scene.

It was kind of by blind luck that I watched a demo recently by someone called ’smash’. The name really rang a bell and I emailed the author to find out that we have both gone to Brussels together for Wired98! He told me that the Uk demo scene is now very active.

Typical! I’ve now moved to Canada!

Anyway the whole incident has got me interested to see whats going on the scene these days. So I’m going to download a few new demos and put them up these pages.

I also might blow the dust of some old graphics books and have a play at knocking something together…

In the mean time here’s a list of links to some my favorites. Many of these won’t run under windows as they were designed to run in DOS 32bit protected mode. Luckily nice people have been capturing them as videos…

2nd reality – the future crew
the secret life of Mr black – orange”
megablast – orange”
paper 64k – psychic link”
square – pulse”
toasted – cubic team”
baygon – melon dezign”

Is it me or have hangovers suddenly got more hardcore?

I still remember the days when I could go out until 5am then get up and go to work! What is it these days that causes my brains to go on vacation every Saturday morning? This morning is especially hard and certainly all well prepared plans will go out of the window in favor of my bed.

I’ve tried many cures. The latest being eat as much B12 as you can stuff down your neck, as soon as you realise you’re pissed. In my case this its first thing in the morning, which as I’ve found out is way too late.

Even this morning I’ve considered this wonder cure, but at 40 bucks a packet, they can kiss my arse.

Today I look around my flat (sorry condo) and it looks like someone has come in and trashed the place. Books everywhere, jacket thrown on the floor.

You know it’s not going well when the third person of the day asks you over MSN; “is this the booze talking?”

To quote the mighty With-Nail; “i feel like a pig shat in my head”. Actually it’s not that bad yet, but I can hear the farmer feeding the little bastard eggs in the next room.

Jägermeister is a horrible drink. I seem to get cartoon drunk when ever that cursed stuff comes out. No matter how many conversations you have with people saying that you can’t stand it. It always seem to show up with your name on it. Damn you Jägermeister!

Oh god, country music has come on the iTunes shuffle because some distance colleague gave you his music collection so long ago. And you simply haven’t the energy to make it to the mouse.

James begins to talk about himself in the 3rd person. Christ it’s getting bad now.

Right well, this post was supposed to have a point. So guess I should get to it…

I’ve recently done my Possessions and Acquisitions License (PAL) for firearms here in Canada.

Yes and I’ve done this before I’ve got my Canadian driving license. Why? Well it’s more fun of course

It takes a while for it to go through with me being new to the country. They need to do loads of background check to make sure you’re not a nutter.

Well anyway a good friend of both Manus and myself, Mark took us to the shooting range for the day last weekend. I can’t tell you how much fun it was…

I was quite nervous at first as I’ve never even fired a gun before. (well only an air rifle, but that doesn’t count.)

Mark brought along:

1. 9mm Smith and Western
2. 9mm Glock
3. AR15 Rifle
4. Remmington 12 guage pump action shotgun

Manu went first. He didn’t enjoy it

I was really accurate with the pistols. Mark even called me a natural, but I think he was just being kind on a beginner. 7 out of 9 were bull-eyes.

Surprisingly there was very little recoil and any of the weapons , with the exception of the shotgun, which would leave a bruise.

I was immediately hooked. I can’t begin to tell you how much fun this was.

A Brilliant way of relieving stress. I’d never thought I’d say this, but I’m thinking of buying one now