I bumped into old leather-pants himself tonight while playing War Thunder. Yes, I’m going by “kfsone”. There’s a reason I’m not an actor, and that’s one of it. Unfortunately, their chat UI is kinda lacking, and although I cancelled my queue I got sucked into a game, at which point – despite the chat window […]

Lets see if anyone recognizes that.  

2 years ago, on a whim, I decided to go Windows 7 Phone – for the 14 days until the droid I actually wanted became available. But I was impressed with the slickness of the device; that Windows 7 Phone UI – the UI where they got rid of all the reasons to need UI [...]

It’s on, finally! The fourth chapter in the Elite franchise! If you never played “Elite“, “Frontier” or “First Encounters“, I imagine you would be highly skeptical about the claims of “Elite: Dangerous“. In 1984, Elite provided gamers with 256 galaxies of 256 stars, each of which had assorted planets and space stations. You loaded up with trading [...]

As much as I’m enjoying playing this game, the irks are … very, very irksome. This is not a review of ACIII, it’s a rant. I am actually enjoying the game, just not nearly as much as I could be with small amounts of simple polish. It also suffers from several cases of over-solving of [...]

Visualization of the concept in “Breaking up is hard to do“.

Apparently, GCC doesn’t like the following second version of this simple piece of code: GCC complains: expected primary-expression before ‘int’ Sigh.

Want to bounce this off some other coders before I make a language-change proposal of it: C#’s “partial” class type lets you spread a class definition across multiple files. But mostly people use it as a way to make private code definitions private – split large functions up into little nuggets that don’t get exposed [...]

I’ve heard and read various things about how SSDs die. But how do they actually die? The failure process seems like it should be more methodical than spindle drives, given less factors, so if you have X many of the same SSD drive and none of them suffer manufacturing defects, if you repeat the same [...]

Some time ago, I wrote about my transition from Android to Windows Phone. I don’t regret having gotten a Windows 7 Phone, but I do resent having one. Allow me to explain… Windows 7 Phone’s UI utterly severs all visual and stylistic ties with it’s desktop ancestry. It is deliciously intuitive – once you unlearn [...]

My last laptop purchase was a big mistake, my Toshiba Satellite L505. Lets start with the searing heat it puts out, proceed to one of the worst laptop-mousepad designs ever and then explode in a frenzied rage and call it quits. No – let me make it simpler. I hate this laptop with such an [...]

I was lucky enough to catch the near-footnote mention when I read the Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1 patch notes last year, but I’ve noticed quite a few programmers missed it – perhaps still being grief stricken at the loss of one of the greatest feature of Visual Studio ever in un-patched 2010. Remember [...]

Watching the Nerdist tribute to Nerd Girls with my gf, she asks “Is there a celebration of us less young gamer chicks”? I replied “cougamers” and then realized I was supposed to say “What? I’m sure Felicia Day is older than you”. But, I’ve had a lot on my mind. What with the moving from [...]

I’m looking at you: HBO, Bad Robot, Frank Darabont… You’re not getting my money thru TV companies who want me to pay for 150+ foreign language channels I can’t understand, sports and religious channels I actively do not want. Not just because they think repeating channels in different resolutions and then charging me for both somehow [...]

Some time ago I decided to install Windows 8 Release Preview onto my laptop, which is not a touch screen. It’s significantly improved over the developer preview. But I can’t shake the feeling that Microsoft has discontinued desktop OS development in Win 8. I can’t speak to how 8 plays out when you have a touch [...]

Pleased to see that Horizons, like WWIIOL, is still with us. These days it – Horizons – is called Istaria. Does sound a bit like they are also a small team grafting frantically, but also they continue to inject the occasional interesting/neat idea into the game. From their email: Developer’s Desk Summer 2012 Welcome to [...]

If you ever need to transfer ESXi VMs between hosts, use the VMware standalone converter. It’s most efficient if you give the VMkernel on each box a dedicated NIC. In this case, both source and destination boxes have vmkernel/vmnic0 go to the same gig switch and vmnet/vmnic1 to a different one. Even the 150Gb machine [...]

Busy squaring away portage of some of the major server rewrites from Rapid Assault to WWIIOL 1.35 at the moment, so haven’t had a lot of time for updates, and due to the down-low nature of what I’m working on, it’s not always easy to find ways to discuss it without touching on aspects of [...]

We’ve just unveiled our “Rapid Assault” project on KickStarter. This is the project that’s spun out of several of our side-projects and we’ve also been using as a development platform for re-engineering some of the WWIIOL subsystems. We’re already in the process of in-house testing the results of porting those improvements back to Battleground Europe [...]

And while you’re at it – see if you can spot the motivations behind what’s being done.  

Hint: If you know what it does, you’re wrong.  

Constraining values to small 0 <= N <= limit is something that many compilers now optimize for you to reduce the number of comparisons and to eliminate the branch implied by the “also”: GCC 4.6.2 compiles the above to the following (I’ve omitted boilerplate code) The optimization here is that converting “i” from signed to [...]

A long time ago, in a Grimsby far, far away, a young kid saves up enough money to buy a C compiler for his Atari ST. So the transition to Microsoft C was pretty natural for me. I’ve owned personal copies of each version of MSVC since C/C++ 7 in 1992, I still have my [...]

-m32 -g0 -Os -flto=4 -fwhole-program -fuse-linker-plugin -march=native -mmmx -msse -mfpmath=sse -mcx16 -mssse3 -msse4.1 -msse2 -std=c++11 -Wall -Wshadow -Wno-deprecated -Winvalid-pch -Wno-array-bounds -Werror -Wno-strict-aliasing -Wno-unused-result -fno-stack-protector -ftracer -pthread Interested to see if -Os has any noticeable improvement over -O3. make -j33 or  – if I’m feeling frisky –  make -j. cpuinfo shows 8 of these (it’s a dual [...]

M-Rated, gritty, bleeding-edge tech StarWars game in-development, StarWars: 1313. How sad that, in contrast, Disney is making a cartoon version of Tron. Seriously, you couldn’t manage Clone Wars quality? My second big disappointment with Tron: Uprising is that they used the Daft Punk soundtrack from Legacy rather than the Tron 2.0 music or composer :(