People please stop writing your own damned programs to deal with dates and times, or at least make them use standard mechanisms to determine if you’ve got a valid date of the month.
There are 29 days in the month of February in a leap year. Leap years happen every 4 years, but specifically don’t happen on years that are divisible by 100, but not by 400. So 1900 wasn’t a leap year. 2000 was, 2004 was and 2008 is.
If you need to check if a date is valid you need the day of the month, the month and the full year (i.e. 1900, 1999, 2000, 2004). Using a 2 digit year is tantamount to the Y2k problem.
Bizarre wireless issue
Leopard’s wireless access is a bit of a problem. This morning it decided to connect to the one base station in the office that is transmitting it’s ssid (down stairs, in the lab). There are two other base stations in the office, each of which does not transmit their ssid (one about 5 feet from me) but does it pick up the base station that’s the closest? nooo, it picks the one that transmits it’s ssid.
There’s no way to force Leopard to bind to a particular base station is there? I think I can do this with windows, and I know I can do it with the N95. The options for the Mac are quite limited. I feel like I’m trapped in a particularly well implemented Gnome environment 🙂
conflict: denied
Do not, under penalty of me beating you three ways from sunday even think of wasting and I mean wasting your money on this crap.
it doesn’t understand resolution, apparently I decided that I could only display the screen at the lowest definition of the attached screens, even though it managed to identify the fact that I was plugged into multiple monitors (hint to developers – when multiple monitors are present, assume that they each are capable of independent resolution choices).
Then there’s the audio… or lack thereof. Once the pre-rendered scenes complete, I hear nothing. Best guess is that it redirects audio to /dev/null, although it’s most likely that it’s going to one of the ~25 audio sinks of vista.
whine, pants, realistically, I have played a sum total of 5 seconds of this game, and I feel cheated.
Shame on you Aer Fungus, you’re getting worse
I was booking the flight to visit my sister in the UK in the next few weeks when I encountered some of the fun changes to the way this airline works. Every check-in bag must be paid for, which I vaguely remember some stuff on a consumer affairs program on the radio over the last few weeks. I need to fly into Heathrow as it’s the easiest airport to deal with for visiting the sister, so I’m pretty much stuck with the fungus. I did check out bmi, but they’re a euro more expensive when tax is included. I should have booked earlier 🙂
Well, the long and the short of it is that they have a check-box at the bottom of the booking page that tells you that you need to check the box to ‘opt-out’ of having your inbox spammed. I thought that the EU had rules stating that you needed to opt-in to have marketing sent to you. It’s two bloody sentences long and I had to read it twice to make sure that I was not going to get spammed by checking on the box.
On leaks
Ok, who’s bright idea was it to create the delete[] operator. I know that deep down, you may possibly, perhaps, in a million damned years, want a separate destructor for array as opposed to individual items, but bear in mind this isn’t the damned slab allocator you’re dealing with once that happens.
Oh, you say, but it knows that because this is an array of objects it will invoke the destructor for each object. So what, I have 4 bytes here that says you should not make me be concerned for that.
Once we’ve passed from the bounds of single-threaded, linear applications, it becomes difficult to maintain such fineries as reference counts and guarantees that we actually are damned certain that we’re the last owner of an object.
Hey, C++, I’m looking at you passing references around like chocolate. Yes; I’m damned aware of all the ways that allow you to keep the reference alive – smart references and all that.
COM – i(f*king)unknown. Oh yeah, that works all right. And if you believe that, here’s a memory manager I’ve got to sell you.
Messages. That’s pretty much it. Everything goes through the message (including the object). That keeps things simple. If you need to pass something back it has the object as well.
Incidentally, this rant was brought to you by the letters A, K and Z and the number 14. After all, it’s not prime.
Several GSODs later…
Well, the mac doesn’t get BSODs it gets a slightly differently colored grey screen of death. Thankfully I had saved before yanking out the plug for the external monitor. It greyscreened on me with the multi-lingual press the power button for a few seconds message on-screen.
I mean really guys, this is grade-A simple stuff, people should be expected to plug these things in and out on a regular basis so it shouldn’t be a kernel panic level issue when something goes wrong in that case.
At least you get a ‘graceful’ video driver restart when things go horribly messy on that platform (unlike XP where you just have a brick).
repetitive, repetitive, you have no idea how repetitive it is
Ok, I ponied up a wodge of cash for a ps3 and a few games (and paid the tax for a few movies too). I got Uncharted:Drake’s Fortune and Assassins Creed (grammar note: this is a creed that covers all Assassins, so I think the apostrophe should come after the s).
Well, Uncharted is just fun. I’m still a newbie to controller based gaming, but over all, I am impressed. The puzzles and combat just seem to work well; mind you I’d be hard pressed to find that many mercs on any one island. You would need to pay them a hell of a lot of money to stay once they start getting killed with any degree of regularity. Reality aside, it just works as a game. The visuals are great and the game play is well paced and just combines to give us a good experience
Not so Assassins Creed. Booooring is probably the best expression for it. Boring in the same way that performing the same, repetitive missions time and time again gets really damned boring. You get to the city, save the person in distress and then sneak in in the company of a bunch of monks. That’s the only way in. Then once you get in you have to perform a minimal set of a handful of styles of missions in order to get to the real mission.
You can go everywhere…. so bloody what, it doesn’t help in the complete absence of variety in the missions.
The visuals are great… No, they’re good, put a few more pixels on Outcast and it would probably beat Assassins Creed hands down.
For a company like Ubisoft who have produced an excellent run of 3D games in the Prince of Persia series (which got boring, but made up for it in the puzzles) I am stunned that they could produce such a band title. I’m left wondering if they were just scared to produce something that had a bit of excitement in it due to the fact that they set it in a contentious time period (which even then is a huge cop-out, god how I have another rant stored about that).
Oh for another Beyond Good And Evil, Damn, that game is a milestone that needs to be shown to people as an example of how to make a game that reaches out to the player.
Where’s the SDK, huh?
I’m just wondering when Apple will be shipping the SDK for the ipod touch/iphone. Just being nosey really. I’ve veered away from jailbreaking it simply because I don’t want to end up with an expensive brick next firmware update.
They say February, but of course remembering that the Leopard launch being the end of the month it could be anywhere up to the 29th.
Another thing I’d like to see is the UI guidelines. I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to reading design guidelines, simply because there are a lot of good points in them. Mind yo, you should not be slavishly obeying them, as, after all, they are only guidelines, and not commandments.
On guidelines, I’m get miffed with applications that require the use of the mouse to accomplish things. Vista’s keyboard usable everywhere is a charm to use, even while it’s gobbling up all those cpu and disk resources with the indexer.
Two fricking DVDs? come on!
I’ve heard of large asset caches, but two fricking DVDs worth of game? that’s just ridiculous. I had to do some serious housekeeping on the machine to get that amount of space back. I really need to do something about my serious lack of space on the box at the moment.
Internets help me!
Damnable laptop audio
Back in the land of the perpetual beep again. Forgot to blacklist the pcspkr driver again. It beeps something horribly when ever there’s an error condition. I should make someone else suffer from this.