everburning

Fucking Blue Shells

I just finished re-watching Trigun on the weekend. I’d purchased, and watched, the DVDs several years ago and thought it was about time for a re-watch.

I’d forgotten just how well done this one is. Everything fits together and there is just the right amount of serious and completely off the wall stuff to keep you watching and laughing.

The main character is done perfectly. Keeps you wondering if he’s just very, very lucky or actually knows what the hell he’s doing.

Anyway, if you want to watch some anime, check out Trigun. I highly recommend it.

There is an excellent article in the ACM Queue on API Design. Having given it a read through, what it’s describing is similar to how we’ve been working with Ewl.

We’ve sent a lot of time on the APIs. Nathan and I have exchanged countless emails, prototypes and test header files describing what we’re looking to do. We’ll often write test source files that use the interfaces to see how the ‘feel’ when being used. We spent a good couple of months working on the current MVC code that Ewl is using.

We spent a lot of time looking to get the most flexible design but not having it being terribly painful to use. I think we’ve struck that balance but it’s a test only time will tell.

With careful design of types and parameters, errors can often be caught at compile time instead of being delayed until runtime. Making the effort to do this is worthwhile because every error caught at compile time is one less bug that can incur extra cost during testing or in the field.

Catching errors early is a big one for us. Anything found at compile time can’t be a bug. Anywhere we can we use enumerations for your paramateres. The values are laid out with detailed names so you can see what’s going on just by reading the caller code.

The APIs are designed to be consistent (and inherit from other widgets as much as possible). We setup a naming structure and have religeously stuck to it (spending the extra time to break all the APIs that didn’t conform to the conventions).

The big convention that Nathan had in place before I join is that all callbacks have the same signature. void cb(Ewl_Widget *w, void *ev, void *data). No matter what you’re doing that’s the signature. It makes it very easy to write out function headers and fill in the bodies later. You never have to look up and see what the signature is for a given callback. (The callbacks are, of course, an enumeration so any errors there will be compile errors.)

Anyway, if you’re doing any API design I’d recommend the article. It gives a lot to think about and a few good examples of how things can go wrong and the cost to fix it when it does.

I just finished reading Rant: the Oral History of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk last night. I’ve got to say, this is a very good book.

I like the style where you’re getting the story as snippets from a whole pile of characters and they all blend together to let you form the whole story.

In typical Palahniuk style there is some really strange stuff in there.

I’d highly recommend this one to anyone that likes Palahniuks other works.

So, I went to the White Stripes concert at the Amphitheater last night. Concert wasn’t bad. Wasn’t great either. They played a lot of their newer songs, of which I don’t have the album so it was the first time I’d heard a lot of it.

I think everyone I’ve talked to about the new album has said you have to listen to it 5 or 6 times before you start to like it. That could have something to do with it.

On the flip side, sweet god, Jack White is an amazing guitar player. It is worth it to see them in concert just to see him play.