This evening I’ve been taking a quick look at C# and the .NET framework; just out of interest, you understand. I’m fairly ashamed to say so (I’m used to be one of the fairly heavy anti-MS crowd), but it’s actually really good; it’s fairly obviously inspired by Java, but with a more C++ like syntax. They’ve also had the chance to look at all the mistakes Java made and clean them up (although the omission of Generics in the first version of the language does seem pretty stupid – it’s surely going to change all the container classes in the standard library when they introduce them in Whidbey…?)

The Windows Forms libraries are also heavily based around MFC, but don’t require the hideous language contortions that MFC required of C++ (on account of of how C# was designed with all this stuff in mind). A window is a class; and to create your own window, you simply subclass System.Window.Forms.Form and create an instance of it; controls are added to windows by creating a Windows.System.Forms.Button (or whatever) object and adding it to the Controls member of the Form class. It is, at last, a decent, properly object oriented user interface toolkit.

I was so ready to hate C#, but it seems that, actually, it’s really good. Damn.

Apparently, Manhunt is SO EVIL that simply owning it causes OTHER PEOPLE TO KILL YOU.

Maybe they just want to put you out of your misery because you bought such a terrible game.

As a teenager, I used to sneakily listen to Mark and Lard on Radio 1, late at night, on my walkman in bed, under the covers. Much of my musical education can be attributed to these illicit listening sessions: the huge variety of styles, eras and bands they played, underground and mainstream, broadened my horizons hugely. Their banter kept me entertained well into the night, and introduced me to a whole world of music, film and cultural stuff, which, living in rural Norfolk, I’d never normally have even heard about.

Fast forward ten or so years, and Mark Radcliffe is back on late night radio once again. Okay, it’s Radio 2, and Boy Lard has disappeared to 6 Music to host his own show; and I’m now listening in my living room in Manchester (God Bless Freeview) rather than under the covers on my walkman – but the essence of the show is still there – lots of great music, old and new, northern banter and more pop culture references than you can shake a proverbial stick at. As well as being a great show, it’s also strangely comforting to be able to hear Mark back on the show he was so clearly meant to be presenting.

Of course, knowing the way the BBC work, they’ll soon latch onto the fact that he’s popular and stick him on the afternoon slot again, give him a playlist and kill everything about the show that makes it so great. Again. So, I guess I’d best just make the most of it whilst it lasts.

Lazy template expansion.

The case for:

• makes writing the compiler easier

The case against:

• means the export keyword doesn’t work, so you have to explicitly include the template definition in every single file you want to use it in

Nearly every goddamned file in my project depends on this templated function I’m working on at the moment. It takes half an hour to recompile the project. I shall shortly be paying Microsoft’s compiler developers a visit to *cough* “talk things through”.

Edit

Turns out it’s not a VC++ problem; it’s an every-compiler-in-the-world problem. More here. I think the Java/Ruby approach might be better here.

Australian-born programmer Tim Ireland is getting tired of the press referring to him as that, given that he can’t even set his video clock. Spread the word around!

MOST EVIL GAME EVER to be released soon.

In fact, I heard Doom 3 is going to be so evil, people are already going on murderous rampages as a result of the game simply existing, even though it’s not available to buy yet and no-one’s actually played it. The EVIL in the game is so PURE AND DISTILLED that it’s capable of travelling through SPACE AND TIME in order to corrupt people’s minds. You don’t even need to see the game, apparently – even if you only hear about it, the sheer QUANTITY OF EVIL contained in the source code will mean that you are FORCED to go out and KILL EVERYONE YOU KNOW to purge the OVERLOAD OF EVIL from your brain.

It’s true, I read it in the Daily Mail.

I’ve just scanned and uploaded the first of my Lomo LC-A shots to the gallery. I like my new toy 🙂

Blogging from the garden on a gorgeous sunny day. I love wireless networks.