http://www.ohthewit.com Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:46:17 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I fondly remember when I first moved out of my parents' place. It was an exciting time: I could eat nothing but frozen pizzas, drink nothing but beer, and spend my entire weekend doing nothing but watch TV on the couch, and nobody could interfere. However, the first step when moving ... http://www.ohthewit.com/2010/01/ben-on-a-hot-tin-roof/ As a techno-geek and software developer, I'm very much in favour of technological advances. Yet sometimes I cannot shake the feeling that things have gotten a tad out of hand. Consider rail travel in Germany with the Deutsche Bahn. A trip with the train used to involve the following: get on ... http://www.ohthewit.com/2009/09/simplicity-on-rails/ Time really does fly; and for me, nothing demonstrates this more clearly than looking at movies that were released ten years ago. You know: movies that you can vividly remember going to see at the cinema, and still consider to be "recent". While pondering this recently, I realised that 1999 was ... http://www.ohthewit.com/2009/06/the-movies-ten-years-ago/ When building applications that include a direct-manipulation user interface, I tend to go with DirectDraw, as this API provides a seemingly simple and efficient way of implementing interactive graphical surfaces. However, as this article demonstrates, simplicity isn't always necessarily a good thing. Consider the following code, which aims to insert a ... http://www.ohthewit.com/2009/03/fast-lines-in-directdraw/ For years, I had been waiting for this opportunity. When standing in line at the supermarket checkout, I tend to quickly dig out my spare change and count it, so I can react quickly when the time comes to cough up - can I pay with coins, or do I have ... http://www.ohthewit.com/2009/03/spare-change-we-can-believe-in/ Today, I had an interesting brain malfunction. As I was rummaging through the attic, I bumped into a box of old 3,5" diskettes that were full of software I wrote fifteen years ago. Excited and eager to see what my code from back then looked like, I ran to my notebook ... http://www.ohthewit.com/2009/01/exhilarating-malfunction/ Recently, a mate and I sought out a McDonald's drive-through, as we both had a bit of a hankering for overpriced grease. We ordered two limited-time-only-and-therefore-the-same-price-as-a-small-car Clogger Burgers and a variety of smaller bits and pieces. As we checked the bag to make sure everything we had ordered was actually ... http://www.ohthewit.com/2009/01/mcservice/ I seem to have a knack for unintentionally confusing and/or offending anyone who tries to serve me food. Incident 1: Sir Dogs-a-lot While on vacation in California last year, a waiter in an Italian restaurant overheard my mate and I talking in German; as he had spent a few years in Germany, ... http://www.ohthewit.com/2008/12/the-food-industry-must-hate-me-by-now/ This post looks at a common system architecture (using business objects, proxy objects and command objects) and describes how code duplication can be avoided in certain situations. While all example code is in C#, this approach can be applied to most other languages with just minor tweaks. Let's assume that we ... http://www.ohthewit.com/2008/09/avoid-duplicate-code-with-delegates/ Today, I bought myself a new bicycle. Actually, I'm using the word "new" quite wrongly: (a) the bike itself is a second-hand model, and (b) it isn't actually replacing any other bike, as I haven't owned anything with pedals since I passed my driving exam in 1996. As I attempted to ... http://www.ohthewit.com/2008/08/tour-de-farce/