Xavier Defrang comments

"Welcome to City 17" by Xavier

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 21:56:07 CET

I actually don't play (*) but I am big fan of dystopian universes so I know a bit about Half Life 2. (*) I will next week as Super Mario Galaxy finally hits the stores :)

"Welcome to City 17" by sircam

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 21:41:24 CET

So they really exist?! I've once heard the soulless female speaker voice of HL² at Heathrow airport. Same tone, same way of calling passengers and citizens. I'm sure it was the same lady in the game and ITRL. Or was it an alien? P.S. You play too much obviously ;-)

"Welcome to City 17" by MoneyMoose

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 01:00:27 CET

Seems these people were at the right place at the wrong time.

"The Game Will Never Be The Same" by h+5

Mon, 5 Nov 2007 09:43:25 CET

"I guess the simple fact that someone who has always dodged PDA's and "smartphones" is actually using one should indicate how great this thing really is." to me it just means that they succeded to create a need where there wasn't any, that is the need of mobile internet device. iphone is cool. i don't see it usefull yet.

"Let's Pretend I Actually Cared About This..." by alex

Sat, 3 Nov 2007 14:58:05 CET

Actually I think both sides are a bit unfair towards each other. First of all Apple made a judgement call about not letting Leopard slip any more than it already had by cutting a few things, which happened to be the latest java version (afaik 1.5 still runs and even had some bugfixes and updates). I presume that they'll have an update soon to include 1.6. I also has to be said that some of the things that were included, such as the Python Objective-C bridge, and the Ruby DTrace probes (http://www.sauria.com/blog/2007/10/30/leopard-java-and-open-source/) were created by people outside of Apple, as these runtimes are open source. Maybe open sourcing Java will have some positive effect here. As for Java that's not the case, and Sun has nothing to do about that, because Apple wanted to do the port themselves (http://blogs.sun.com/jag/).

"Let's Pretend I Actually Cared About This..." by Xavier

Thu, 1 Nov 2007 16:49:15 CET

This is surely not handy for Java developers but again the JDK is a product of Sun, so they should take the flak if like many other programming environments, it can't be built as-is under any UNIX flavor. Java developers surely ain't a significant portion of the OS X users base, so it makes sense for Apple not to delay their release (already postponed) of Leopard just because Sun couldn't ship a proper JRE and JDK. John Gruber has posted some follow up on this story. But, as I said: I couldn't care less. I was just finding that it was a little unfair to bash Apple for this... especially as there are things I find much more annoying about Leopard like the missing rounded corners of the menu bar! Now that is scandalous! ;)

"Let's Pretend I Actually Cared About This..." by sircam

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 17:34:29 CET

Well, they pay the big bucks to get the shiny brushed metal case; often they've been "loyal" customers for many years, everything was fine then the wind changed and now they're strongly disappointed. No need to be pissed off at Apple indeed, but I must admit a lack of Java support is a bit annoying for a Java developer.

"Enough Chit Chat..." by aikii

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 09:05:50 CEST

Funny thought about ruby : every time I read blog posts about its syntax, people are happy to leave C-like syntax for a more english-like syntax. And that's about the same thing you read on the venerable Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper's wikipedia article ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper ) : "it was her idea that programs could be written in a language that was close to English rather than in machine code or languages close to machine code (such as assembly language), which is how it was normally done at that time" Indeed this philosophy was used to invent ... COBOL ;-) I guess we have to admit that's the very same intend that lead both languages' syntax. But COBOL couldn't be based on any past experience, while ruby appeared 40 years later .. for sure, we have to blame the industry in the first place for its poor choices, not the inventors. I guess the same thing can be said about flash/flex's uses. I wish I could have some fun with it, like the guys at digg : http://labs.digg.com/swarm/

"Enough Chit Chat..." by Xavier

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 01:24:08 CEST

I'm absolutely not convinced by Flex neither, the technology is unusable without their IDE. Flash front-ends may have a niche but the whole framework looks way too enterprisey. I find data-driven Flash movies (used e.g. for data visualization) much easier to integrate with existing backend, especially if you build your app the RESTful way. Same goes for handling complex or multimedia user input, in nearly all cases, a simple web call will do the trick. I had a bit the same feeling you have when I really got deep into Ruby, I just felt home. This was the language I had been waiting for. And it's still the language that allows me to work like I always wanted to work. When I'm writing Ruby code, I'm not piling Lego bricks, I'm playing with Play-Doh! :) But I always found inspiration in other languages and technologies. For instance, I find the Cocoa framework an invaluable source of inspiration for designing UI models even for web apps! I don't actually plan to spend my whole sparetime writing SmallTalk programs, I'm just reading books for now. The first thing that struck me was how Ruby was inspired by the SmallTalk model. They even share the same vocabulary (like "respond to") or syntax (like the arguments between pipes). From what I've read so far, SmallTalk really feels like the LISP of Object-Oriented languages. A simple and well defined dynamic language which makes it relatively easy to write a bullet-proof runtime environment for it. But SmallTalk has a major downside, it's syntax was designed to please lexical analyzers, not humans. This alone will stop me from considering writing actual code in this language, I'll be already happy with what I learn from its design and philosophy!

"Enough Chit Chat..." by aikii

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:54:29 CEST

I just checked out flex screencast http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/media/flexapp/ . Looks like another horrible tag soup. Isn't that really coldfusion 2.0 ? if you're able to code html you can program in a language where everything is a tag ... so welcome to flex ! If you know XML, you know about programming too. Yikes, get out of here ... ( no wonder I heard immoweb.be gave up trying to refurbish their website ... made in coldfusion ) Looks strange: I don't feel like learning another programming language again ... if it hasn't any real business use where it's better than anything else. Yeah, even if gurus say it's the language for the next decade ( btw, good luck trying to convince me leaving RoR for something better in web development ). Am I rotting or evolving ? ;-) Have fun with smalltalk, anyway. I'll be glad to read any discover you make!