Thursday, August 25, 2005

Quote of the day

"... You are free to fold, spindle or mutilate for the betterment of your proprietary closed-source product that makes you zillions of dollars, without penalty ..."

from Drools Licensing.

Talking about Drools' liberal open source license. LOL!

Friday, August 19, 2005

Fixed and Floating point for J2ME

As you probably know, J2ME in its most basic form doesn't support floating point operations. This can be a problem if you are trying to develop games for it.

I've been looking around for alternatives, and found that most sites reference you to MathFP (the link I had seems to be broken, google for it), which is a fast library to do fixed point math. The problem with it is that for certain types of calculations, fixed point can be complicated, given that it is hard to represent numbers that are too small or too large, and mix those in the same calculation.

Browsing around I found MicroFloat, which is a very nice floating point library written entirely in Java. The only gotcha is that it requires long support from the KVM.

There are other libraries around (which I havent tested) such as Real Java.

Well, now to start that doom clone for my cell phone...

Monday, August 08, 2005

Impressive DOM scripting

If you happen to have a few minutes of spare time, check out "Interactive DOM Scripting" which is simply awesome.

The most impressive pages are IE only (don't blame me). This site has the spirit of the old demos built for machines such as the Commodore Amiga 500. A bit of nostalgia is unavoidable.

Thursday, August 04, 2005

Quote of the day

"In a perfect world, reading code would be like reading a book. Unfortunately, code is written for computers to execute, not for humans to read. You can’t just read code from start to finish—they’re like those choose-your-own-ending books, forcing you to go all over the place to figure out how not to kill your main character. "

From Successful Strategies for Commenting Code - By Ryan Campbell

The quote is great, but I disagree with some of the statements in the article. I'm more of the idea that code comments should explain why you are doing something, not how. Anyway, as with any imperative guidelines, it is more important the spirit of the law, than the law itself.

In spirit, I think the idea of code comments is to make code more understandable for other people or for a future version of yourself.

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Not much time left

It has been a while since my last post, I've been really busy lately because a new version of our product is in the pipeline, and development is picking up speed.

I'll continue the regular posts soon (hopefully!).