Category Archives: Rants

The Bedroom Programmer: Cycle over?

“Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.”Don Marquis It seems only reasonable that the first (and possibly only, I’m really not doing well with this blog lark recently) post of 2014 consists of some editorial that leads to … Continue reading

Posted in Armchair general, My iPhone game, Rants, Software development | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

Would you like to play a nice game of chess?

If you’re my age then as well as lurking in your secret lair plotting your takeover of the universe, you’ll almost certainly remember War Games. War Games is an utterly fantastic movie of its time and it is still, all … Continue reading

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Duh duh duh. Duh duh duh. Duh duh duh

Duh duh duh. The sound of GSM digital phones interfering with electronics. It’s also the sound of lies, as I enjoyed witnessing on BBC breakfast a couple of months ago. They’d wheeled in a chap called Michael Roberts from ATOC … Continue reading

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Rollin’ contracts rollin’… Until the END OF TIME ITSELF

We’ve all laughed and giggled at pictures of those people on TV queueing on launch day for some device or another. Well, back in May 2010, I was those people. At 7AM (and this was pre-baby cobra, so 7AM was … Continue reading

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P P P Pick up a patent (portfolio)

“If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.” – Bill Gates, Challenges and Strategy Memo, 16 May 1991 … Continue reading

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What does this button do?

“The only ‘intuitive’ interface is the nipple. After that, it’s all learned.” Well, restring my guitar, this is interesting in a “come back and haunt you” sort of way. The gist of the article is a bloke from Samsung saying … Continue reading

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Fire sale: everything must go!

“Ignorance is the soil in which belief in miracles grows.”— Robert G. Ingersoll Politics is a very difficult subject to have an opinion on: if we all agreed, we would all live in peace and harmony. Regrettably, it has been … Continue reading

Posted in Miscellaneous rubbish, Rants | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Imbuing a certain niceness on one’s formatting

Oh my, std::locale(“”) is gorgeous when slapped on a std::stringstream. So long as you’re not writing super-duper-performance-sensitive code, you can do wonderful things like this: #include <string> #include <sstream> #include <locale> #include <iostream> #include <iomanip> int main() { std::stringstream ss; … Continue reading

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