Recent activity: Google DevQuiz and why you probably shouldn't use Visual C++

 Google Developer Day Tokyo is on end of September.

 After previous years where signup was first come first served, this year they're filtering people by using a "developer quiz". Seems a reasonable enough move to make. I've noticed a few people who are interested in going just for the prospect of a chance at a "free phone" since there is some speculation they'll be giving away an android handset again this year(If I'm not mistaken they already gave them out at this years I/O).

 Despite starting early, and getting the first half done well before the deadline, I got distracted by other things for a while and ended up doing the remaining half in the last day. Got all my solutions in, and at least according to the automated grader I cleared all the problems successfully. I can only hope that I don't lose  points for bad code or something(because my "test of concept" prototype ended up getting hacked into my final solution...). I'll probably throw up some of the code here later with light commentary.

 Unfortunately I lost a fair bit of time to poor problem comprehension as they were stated only in Japanese. I'm quite comfortable with it, but considering there's a reasonable amount of English speakers participating, it would have been nice to have English version of the questions.

 Since I was doing my work on a pc I don't normally use for development, I thought I'd give Visual C++ a go for old times sake(when I was doing a lot of DirectX/Win32 programming at university)... See how it was now.

 Unfortunately I was rather disappointed. While IDE's like eclipse have come ahead leaps and bounds, Visual C++(or at least the express edition) is slow and clumsy. Often for apparently no good reason it would just slow down, and syntax checking and highlighting is terribly buggy. While it is the express edition with a cut-down feature set, I don't think that "adding bugs" is the same as feature cuts. I used to have a lot of appreciation for Visual Studio as one of the better Microsoft products, but right now it does little to please and much to annoy.

 On a final note, I recently picked up "Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition". I've only just gotten started on it, but it's a real trip to the past. The old school(pre-ANSI) C is a real shocker, and having to learn PDP-11 assembly is a bit of an irritation, but what I've read so far has been interesting and educating.

The Practice of Programming

Yep. I'm far from done with SICP, but the other books I feel compelled to order are also very interesting.

Recently I read a quote somewhere about programming style that was taken out of Kernighan and Pike's "The Practice of Programming". It was neat enough that I went to check it out on Amazon, and as one would, ended up buying it.

Having read through the first few chapters so far it's been a good refreshed on some basic algorithms, and some well thought out strategies. The CVS formatting example in chapter 4 is far from amazing, but it takes a good measured approach to a common problem that has far too many annoying little edge cases. More than that however, the Markov Chain work in chapter 3 was great. It was interesting to see the 150 line C program taken down to 20 lines in awk. Maybe one of these days I'll take a look at that(after haskell, clojure, ada and all the other languages with nifty features I've been wanting to look at). What was surprising though was how poor some of the STL implementations appeared to be.

A very compact book well worth the read for anyone serious about programming. If I have any criticism of it, it would likely lie in some of the rather cryptic examples that could've been a lot more clear with proper variable naming. They are always explained afterwards, and very clever, but many of them don't feel entirely necessary. Despite that minor niggle, definitely recommended and I look forward to the other half.