I’m just ripping Joe Satriani’s ground breaking Surfing with the alien album. Then I suddenly realized the cover art is actually the Silver Surfer from Fantastic Four. Quite a cool discovery. 
Jun 13
Jun 11
This was on digg today: Top Ten of Programming Advice NOT to follow. I’d like to share my take on them one by one.
10) “Use error codes instead of exceptions”
Agree. I don’t know why you want to use error codes unless you are dealing with legacy system.
9) “Use unsigned integers for values that can only be positive”
Well, I don’t really care.
8 ) “Design classes parallel to their physical counterparts”
Agree. It would be nice if you can do it. But you don’t have to. Especially if it’s gonna take a lot of effort.
7) “Make sure your team shares a common coding standard”
Disagree. I don’t care what coding style each team member uses. But with all the concurrent development, version control and merging going on, can we at lease use the same code format please?
6) “Write lots of comments”
Agree. Good programmers don’t need and don’t write comments.
5) “Use accessors or properties rather than public fields”
Disagree. I don’t see what’s the big deal with using accessors.
4) “Use the singleton pattern for variables that you KNOW you should have only one instance of”
Kind of agree. But I think singleton is appropriate for looking up stuff like factories or strategies.
3) “Be tolerant with input and strict with output”
Agree. Actually I don’t recall hearing this advice from anybody.
2) “Code all the corner cases immediately, cause otherwise you’ll never go back and fix things”
Agree. If you follow this advice, it means you are not doing Test Driven Development.
1) “Design first, then code”
Agree. That’s sooooo waterfall.
Jun 11
I bought a latest MacBook Pro the day they released it. It seems that I’ve formed a habit of buying new Apple products on the release day. Of course once I placed the order, I can’t help but checking the order status and following the shipment’s grand journey from Shanghai to Alaska to Memphis and finally to Calgary. I did that for about a dozen times on Friday. It was during one of those times that Chris said to me, “Are you macterbating again?” I paused for a second then burst into laughter. Really, I was not offended at all. Although I still don’t admit that I’m a Mac fanboy, no other word will be more appropriate to describe the state of my mind at the time. I think I’m gonna make a Lolcat picture about it (if my cat can ever cooperate).
