Comments for Dragons in the Algorithm

Comment on Many ways to attack websites by Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 02:38:56 +0000

drop table students;

Comment on Binary Backward Compatibility by Joey hess

Joey hess — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:27:55 +0000

That reminded me of this interesting leacture on The Expression Problem.

http://www.developerfusion.com/media/85198/c9-lectures-dr-ralf-lmmel-advanced-functional-programming-the-expression-problem/

Comment on Set Default Address Book in Outlook 2010 by Shannon

Shannon — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 08:37:13 +0000

Excellent! Thanks so much for posting. It’s been a bug bear of mine for years. It’s only saving a couple of clicks but the amount of time overall is beneficial to open my contacts as default location to select from, that and not feeling peeved that I’d not managed to find a solution, a win win for me. Thanks again for your time and consideration of others! Appreciated.

Comment on Set Default Address Book in Outlook 2010 by mcherm

mcherm — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 11:58:26 +0000

Thanks. I know I have benefited uncountable times from helpful notes someone posted to the internet so I try to do the same as payback.

Comment on Set Default Address Book in Outlook 2010 by Tom Clayton

Tom Clayton — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 02:51:23 +0000

What a kind and helpful gesture to end a day of exhausting effort to come to terms with Outlook 2010 and make it tractable. Like trying to navigate the Labyrinthe without a clew–or with too many clues online and not enough clear solutions.

Comment on When to Wrap a Library by mcherm

mcherm — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 22:50:04 +0000

My apologies for mistakenly labeling Slick2D as a Python library… I meant Java. I will correct it in the essay.

I am aware that LWJGL is intentionally wrapping the C library calls. I even agree that there is some good sense in intentionally keeping LWJGL at a low level and allowing other libraries like Slick2D to wrap it. This divides the work: one library responsible for raw bindings, concerned with exposing the underlying functionality as efficiently as possible, and another library responsible for providing a more useable API (in particular, a usable API for a subset of the entire functionality).

But I continue to think that this case serves as an excellent demonstration of the (unusual) case where a library you might want to use (LWJGL) has a really lousy API. In this case, LWJGL has a reason for its lousy API (namely, that it mimics the C APIs), but nevertheless it is still true, and that is why a wrapper like Slick2D is so useful.

Comment on When to Wrap a Library by Kappa

Kappa — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 17:43:55 +0000

You really should check your facts properly before posting such articles, especially if you decide to criticise other peoples work.

- Slick2D is not a python library in fact its a pure Java library.

- LWJGL’s api is intentionally raw and maps directly to the C library calls of the OpenGL, OpenAL and OpenCL libraries. Its intended to be a low level library and has no role in setting or wrapping its own api calls.

- You’re also wrong that Slick2D doesn’t provide any real functionality over LWJGL. LWJGL is just a raw binding and doesn’t provide any of its own features (except the odd basic window creation, etc). Slick2D provides its own api which clones the Java2D api, further provides support for Images, Fonts, 2D graphics drawing, particle effects, tile map loading, basic game framework, etc.

- In conclusion LWJGL is a library that is suppose to be wrapped and used for building libraries and engines on top of. You can’t build games directly with it without writing your own library code. Its an enabling technology provided to give you access to native features which are not otherwise available to java.

Comment on Logging APIs – Evaluating Options by When to Wrap a Library : Dragons in the Algorithm

When to Wrap a Library : Dragons in the Algorithm — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 16:20:25 +0000

[...] libraries, the new library typically does not have exactly the same API. For example, when we switched to SLF4J for logging one of the reasons for doing so was that it offered a better API that allowed [...]

Comment on Setting Low Prices by Josh Burger

Josh Burger — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 21:47:09 +0000

Seems you’re right. I withdraw my request. (and apparently spell better than I thought as I’ve not seen the red underliny thing in Chrome before)

Comment on Setting Low Prices by mcherm

mcherm — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 15:57:14 +0000

Josh:

Yes, that’s certainly an issue with micropayments. It comes out to the same thing: You are saying that you’d rather pay $10/month for unlimited service than $7.50/month on average — in other words, you value the effort to decide which articles are “worth it” at $2.50/month or more.

As for the spell check, I thought those were obsolete? I use Firefox or Chrome and rely on the browser to provide spellcheck and spelling correction within the dialog box, so I no longer care if tools have spellcheck, except for those few tools that are NOT web based.