I was doing a talk and a Q&A session at a local university. Unaware of the consequences, one guy asked about the usefulness of the programming courses they have in real work…

Oh boy. Do you really want to go there?
(more…)

Mixing a sprint of bug fixing before the release and Tom Waits’ music results in interesting combination. For example, Crossroads describes bug fixing process perfectly:

And that’s where ol’ George found himself out there at the FogBugz
Fixin’ the devil’s bugs
Now, a man figures it’s his bugs and he’ll assign whom he wants
But it don’t always work out that way
You see, some bugs are special for a certain target
A certain platform, or a certain person
And no matter whom you’re assignin’, that’s where the bug ‘ll end up
And in the moment of assigning your mouse turns into a dowser’s wand
And clicks where the bug wants to go.

Uhm. Yeah.

Here, ryg nails it:

why would you want sound and physics when you can have sparsely clothed ninja space marine amazon secret agents riding on chainsaw-hoofed flying pink stealth space unicorns through a brightly colored dystopian african urban jungle fantasy wasteland island state populated with mutated propaganda-spewing gas mask-wearing alien nazi zombie demons that entered this island planet dimension through a hellgate portal invasion triggered by a black magic freak teleportation experiment resonance cascade accident caused by a power-hungry mad scientist wizard evil genius working for a multinational corporation conspiracy of lawyers and weapons manufacturers without morals, and all that in its proper realtime dynamically lit globally illuminated deferred-shaded parallax-occlusion-mapped ambient-occluded shadow-buffered high dynamic range silky smooth glory?

Pretty much sums up the mainstream game industry!

Ok, I don’t exactly like Windows Vista. But I just spent 6 months using Vista as my primary OS at work… because everyone else was using XP, and someone had to make sure everything works on Vista as well. So it was me.

In summary, Vista is not that bad.

Once you get used to changes in Explorer, different skin and so on – it’s actually usable. I think they have made some real improvements in the underlying technology, too bad they managed to “compensate” for all of that by inconsistencies and lack of polish in user interface.

At this point it’s minor quirks in UI that annoy me, but apart from that, Vista is okay. Look:

Who implemented blending of icon overlays and do they still have a job? No sir, that shield icon is not properly blended here!

Who thought it’s a good idea to make the Burn icon bright red? In 6 months, I never used it. Why is it the brightest thing in the whole Explorer window?

Try going one folder up without resorting to this drop down menu. Utilities is the current folder here. And no, there’s no keyboard shortcut for “go up” either (there was in XP, which was perfect).

And of course, the awesome shutdown menu. The two buttons – never used them. What I always use is “Shut Down” from the menu. And let’s not even talk about all the choices in the menu (no, more choices is not always better).

So yeah. It’s not stellar, it has tons of small annoyances (and some large ones – try developing web plugins with UAC on…), but it’s usable. I might have gotten used to it by now, actually.

Ok, I’m somewhat late to jump onto the latest fads bandwagon, but here it goes – I added a Twitter widget here on the sidebar. I blame Steve Streeting for pushing me over the edge!

Me on Twitter.

Somewhat amusing quote from gamedeff.com:

Дешевая популярность в тяжелые времена не мешает, поэтому в блог срать надо почаще (всем, кстати, рекомендую).

Preemptive note: Google Translate does not quite cope with it.

No, I don’t have any particular point to make. But I did not even get the t-shirt…

This was the function that I added:

void GUIView::MakeVistaDWMHappyDance()
{
    // Looks like Vista has some bug in DWM. Whenever we maximize or dock
    // a view, we must do something magic, otherwise
    // white stuff appears in place of the view.
    // See http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=4208117&SiteID=1

    bool earlierThanVista = systeminfo::GetOperatingSystemNumeric() < 600;
    if( earlierThanVista )
        return;

    // What seems to work is drawing one pixel via GDI.
    // We draw it at (1,1) with usual background color.
    int grayColor = 0.61f * 255.0f;
    PAINTSTRUCT ps;
    BeginPaint(m_View, &ps);
    SetPixel(ps.hdc, 1, 1, RGB(grayColor,grayColor,grayColor));
    EndPaint(m_View, &ps);
}

I know. Reading from screen when Aero is on is slow, bad and wrong. But then, what do you do? It’s better than users staring an all-white window just because Vista decided to draw it white, no matter what you think you’re drawing into it.

…still, MakeVistaDWMHappyDance is not nearly as cool as

internal interface ICanHazCustomMenu { … }

that Nicholas added a while ago.

After a steaming pile of poo that is Windows Vista, looks like Windows 7 will be something that is done right.

Ok, to be fair, Vista has lots of new features and improvements under the hood. Now, I haven’t used them, but transactional file system, exposed low level APIs to get detailed memory/IO stats, etc. etc. sound like cool & useful stuff. The problem with Vista is that all those core improvements are out-weighted by inconsistent & slow UI and some stupid blunders.

Now, Windows 7 seems to be taking on two things: 1) performance and 2) consistency. Building on all the low level improvements done in Vista, and getting the part that is visible to the user right. Yay if Microsoft can pull this off. We’ll see.

I’m quoting awesome post by Charles Hinshaw from Unity forums:

I vote that we complain enough that they don’t share plans until everything is 200% done – I personally don’t want to know about a new version of Unity until after I have already shipped at least one game built with that version.

Alternately, UT could issue press releases that lack any information that might set expectations and/or require approval from third parties:

Unity Technologies ApS, announced today that they may be releasing an update to their popular game development software at an undisclosed future time.

From their offices in Copenhagen, Unity Technologies CEO and co-founder, David Helgason, said “We’re pretty excited not to announce anything specific about this potential upcoming release as we think that many of our users may be pleased by the addition of some number of features that may not have been present in previous versions of the software.”

Tom Higgins, Product Evangelist, added “The features in this software are making it possible for a number of undisclosed companies to work on various projects that may be released in the future. I think all of our users might be inspired by the things that may currently be under development with this future version of Unity.”

edit: Uhm, based on the replies that follow, apparently it wasn’t obvious that I am not seriously requesting this.

Way to go! :)