The Book of Sand

Argentine literary genius Jorge Luis Borges ('magic realist') is one of my favorite writers. Borges unravels the many human uses of information within a universe that is mystical and mathematical at once. His work illuminates the way we, as human beings, struggle to capture meaning - any meaning - from infinite quanities of data. Borges explores ideas such as the recursivity of mirrors, points in space containing all the universe (The Aleph) and man's struggle to find meaning in endless information (The Library of Babel & The Book of Sand).

For many software developers, creation of software, while frequently mundane, is still very much an aesthetic pursuit - an art. When a piece of software is 'beautiful' it is so in the same way that a Borges short story is beautiful, and in a very different way than a Dostoevsky short story is beautiful (which is the gut-wrenching, depth-of-human-suffering-and-existential-torment sort of way) or in the way a Hemingway story (the depth-of-human-suffering-but-don't-actually-ever-say-it sort of way) is.

A Prediction from 2007

In 2007, I wrote a post called --

Xbox 360, PS3 Games Unplayable on Future Hardware?

Where I concluded that, due to technical reasons detailed in that post --

.. I suspect that far more Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games will be unplayable on future hardware than Xbox and PS2 games on the 360 and PS3.

Unfortunately, I was right, as we've known since before the new hardware was released nearly a year and a half ago.  The Xbox One and PS4 are capable of playing exactly zero binaries built for their predecessors.

But just because we saw it coming doesn't make it any less painful.  Once our older machines die, how will we play those games we love?

Java-Style Properties Files in C++

(Originally posted Feb 28, 2008)

Need to handle Java-style properties files in C++? I've decided to post some of my own personal library of code on this blog. This is one of those occasionally useful things.

javaproperties on github

If you fix any bugs, extend the code or anything else, send back your changes if you don't mind. ;)

Core Plot Tutorials

Handy references for Core Plot, which I use for making charts in iOS apps.

• Core Plot Tutorial
• Pie Chart at Ray Wenderlich
• Comparing charting/graphing libraries
• Core Plot itself on github

Surge of Video Game Nostalgia

When I was a wee lad in the mid 1980s, Compute! magazine would run ads like this.  Box cover art is what sold it back then, I'm telling you.

My Apps

Ideas Are Cheap

Ideas Are Cheap, Execution is Worth Millions

This has been on my mind lately regarding mobile app ideas.  Or as Thomas Edison most famously put it,

"Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration."  

These days it seems like 99.999% perspiration.