soledad penadés » oddities

Euskal 2010 demoshow

sole — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 12:15:09 +0000

I was making a much overdue hard disk clearance, when I found the videos from the demoshow I prepared for past Euskal.

Since it’s a bit silly to upload the videos anywhere (because they already are somewhere in the internets) and it’s not very practical for watchers anyway, I decided to look for the videos in YouTube and create a playlist. That way I can share it with you, and delete the videos from my hard drive and thus make room in it! Yay! \o/

For the curious and impatient, these are the videos, wilds, demos, etc. in the playlist:

Visual Approach to the Aesthetics of Techno by Neuro:Concept
HBC-0008: How to use Blender by HBC
Craft by LFT
Julie by Nuance
Memorize your future by Neuro:Concept
Making of Shizzle by Team PokeMe
Comic Bakery by Press Play On Tape
Realtime Demo Wannabe by Maxon
Shizzle by Team PokeMe
Second Reality 64 by Smash Designs
Youscope by TVT

I know it’s an strange mix, but the idea was to show some classics, oddities and very cool things so that people at Euskal would get amazed and inspired for doing nice things for the Wild and Animation compos, whose entries are generally a bit “bland”.

The BBC accidentally reveals some source code

sole — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:42:40 +0000

… in this recipe (scroll to the bottom), and here’s the question: Which programming language are they using in that piece of code?

My vote goes for Perl, because…

It’s a well-known, public fact that they use Perl. In fact I have even heard someone complained the version of Perl they use is so old and stagnant they had to sort of emulate new features (already existing in newer versions of Perl)
It can’t be PHP because of the brackets surrounding glossid
It can’t be Python or ruby because of the ending semicolon. Ok, you can use semicolons with Python or Ruby but it’s idiotic to do such a thing when you’re free of that tyranny
I also thought of some JSON which hadn’t been properly hidden, but again, why use a dollar sign to name a variable in javascript unless you’re using it for jQuery or something like that?

If anybody from the beeb wants to reveal which language is it, feel free to do that… no need to use your @bbc.co.uk e-mail in the comment ;-)

Oh, and just in case they fix this little anomaly in their system, here’s a screenshot of the page. Captured with Screengrab.

By the way, I’m so hoping their database of recipes is not built upon a ton of manually typed in hashes. For the sake of their own mental health, specially the maintainers’. It worries me that the rest of recipes I have checked do not exhibit this problem. I really hope no one has to update these pages manually.

Edit: Added “in that piece of code” to clarify the question, sorry if it was too vague O:-)

Mental note about #ifndef’s

sole — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 23:20:30 +0000

When using #ifndef for #include guards:

#ifndef BLAH_H

#define BLAH_H



// code



#endif

make sure that #ifndef and #define are the first lines of the archive!

I had placed some comments before them and that made me lose several hours, trying to find out why class forward declarations didn’t work as they should. One could expect the compiler to ignore comments automatically but that’s not the case.

I also looked for something as #pragma once for GCC, since I remembered that from when I used Visual C++, but although it was supported at some time, it is now deprecated, so the only solution is placing the #ifndef where it must be (at the very beginning).

Xcode3 oddities

sole — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:32:05 +0000

It’s been a couple of interesting days already, got ideas for something fun and I’m using XCode quite furiously. Everything began since I got SDL working with OpenGl (what derived into a Linux version of the famously rotating triangle with pink background), then a couple of weeks later I made some additions which I’m further developing now.

But… what’s going on with XCode3? It’s just me the only one which has to close it and reopen it again every X debugging attempts? or maybe that’s what the X in XCode stands for…

The symptoms are: you Build and Go (Compile and debug in ye olde jargon) and then one would expect the debugger to pop up. But nothing happens because a) it didn’t rebuild at all or b) it couldn’t attach the debugger to the process. So it runs as normal.

There’s another weird thing, sometimes I add a new method in a class header (I’m working with C++) and when I write the method body in the .cpp file and try to compile, I get a message saying that there aren’t matches with the definitions of the class, blabla. I solved this one cleaning all targets and rebuilding again, but if you know a better way of fixing it, I’m all ears.

Maybe there are hidden options which can be configured with

defaults write com.apple.Xcode AppleAnnoyances off

or something like that!

Event though, I must say that I like XCode2 way more than the previous version. If I had to choose a single reason it would be the removal of ZeroLink, then I would say the new finder, code folding, etc. (I never use its SCM features or design features so I can’t tell)

Unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM

sole — Thu, 24 May 2007 08:08:03 +0000

In almost every programming language, parsing errors tend to be boring, and PHP is not going to be an exception… unless you get one of these:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM

If you aren’t aware, what it means is “Oh, there’s an unexpected double colon where it shouldn’t have appeared”.

But even if it’s a bit obscure, sometimes it’s funny to get this error. Just for contrasting with all the plainly boring rest, like unexpected ‘}’, unexpected ‘,’ … all that. Even more funny is that those characters (‘::’) are also defined as T_DOUBLE_COLON. But why did the programmers decide to use the cryptic error message is something of a mistery for me yet.

The first time I got the error I thought I had found an easter egg! Either that, or the php interpreter had gone nuts…