Saturday, December 31, 2016

End of year realization

I'm basically an artist who "paints" with code, and good debuggers are one of my brushes. Except, each "painting" involves a variable amount of mental and/or physical resources. The Steam Linux project was the hardest one I've ever done so far. Getting games on Linux and pushing the GL driver teams to go in the right directions was extremely difficult.

Thankfully, each project is a learning experience. Each time I get better at understanding myself.

Friday, December 16, 2016

Visual Studio 2015's Busted Find Dialog

In Visual Studio 2015, Microsoft decided to wreck the Find dialog so it's perma-docked into the upper right-hand corner of the document. The dialog is too small, and the key icons (to enable case sensitive searching or searching for whole words) are too small and hard to use:


By comparison, here's 2010's:


The new find dialog in 2015 is an example of bad UI, and I'm not the only Windows C++ developer I know who seriously dislikes it.

Saturday, December 10, 2016

"The Ballad of the Green Beret"

I heard this playing at the local Pagliacci's recently, and I realized this is one of the tunes my father used to play all the time. He was in Vietnam in I think '68 or '69, totally lost alone in the jungle, and was saved by a branch of the Special Forces called the Green Beret's.