A story going around at the moment is how Microsoft Exchange ran into a problem with the new year – somewhere the time was being stored as an integer that reads in base 10 like YYMMDDHHMM, so once YY became 22 it exceeded the maximum of 2147483647 available to a signed 32-bit integer, drama ensued. […]
read moreA common, if not ubiquitous, necessity in platformers or other real-time videogamey applications with a vertical dimension is some sort of jumping mechanic. The essence of a jump is straightforward – press a button and launch upwards, reaching an apex and returning to the ground. Was that introduction even required? In terms of the engine […]
read moreFor the most part, everything to do with orbits is a consequence of one simple rule: Newton’s law of universal gravitation. It simply states that all masses are attracted by a force that increases with mass and decreases faster with distance. General relativity describes certain physical observations much more accurately, but the differences only become […]
read moreObject-oriented programming is littered with long terms that refer to very simple ideas. A lot of the time when you try to find out what they mean, you have to read through multiple pages of wordy explanation that either assumes objects are a foreign concept to you, or just talks so much about theory and […]
read moreDisclaimer: I have never actually implemented a Mandelbrot set renderer nor benchmarked any of what I’m about to say. What follows is a mathematical approach, given that rendering the Mandelbrot set is inherently mathematical. Background information Skip this if you already know the details of the Mandelbrot set, unless you want to read what I […]
read moreYou’ve probably encountered a situation where a “Read/Load more” link takes up as much space as it hides. Maybe a comment is six lines long and it obscures the last one. Come on guys, it’s not hard to do properly. With n as the number of lines you want to show, what should be done […]
read moreFirst, the necessary context: an axonometric projection is a type of parallel projection, basically meaning there’s no perspective. Further, it’s a type of orthographic projection, meaning there’s none of the distortion present in an oblique projection (which I hate with a passion). The final necessary context is that the view is rotated to reveal all […]
read moreSince this site runs WordPress, I was receiving huge amounts of spam. At first I tolerated it, but recently it became too much. I had to start adding more and more phrases to the blacklist, but it still persisted. Fortunately, there was one very useful fact I noticed: it was all coming from the same […]
read moreLook at any discussion over some shortcoming of Python syntax, and somebody is bound to mention the following guideline: There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it. Basically, it goes like this: Person: why doesn’t Python have support for <feature x>? This is pretty basic. Python advocate: <feature x> is […]
read moreTyped this into the Python shell: >>> 1 – 2/3 0.33333333333333337 Yeah…
read more