So we all have been here, I had finished a project using VS2008, implementing  Datagridviews on litterally each and every form of the system. This had been a requirement from the onset as to ensure easy searching,navigation and capturing of data. So the data capture ladies start doing their thing and low and behold the dreaded call... they are unhappy with the speed of the DataGridView. I had to agree with them, the repaint of the and overall perfromance of the grid is awfull. So started a tedious process of trying to speed this up...The first step was to look at ...

I recently released my first game, X Fleet, available now in Android Market. It’s a fast paced space shooter / rpg riddled with awesomeness and you should get it now.The reason you should avoid hierarchies/inheritance is your objects will be far too varied and complicated in form to be accurately represented as such. More on this below. The alternative is a component model. This is very basic. Instead of having everything inheriting (e.g. Object -> MovableObject -> AnimatedMovableObject), have your GameObjects include a list of GameComponents, and delegate behaviour from the ...

SOMETIMES it takes but a single pebble to start an avalanche. On January 21st Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote a blog post outlining the reasons for his longstanding boycott of research journals published by Elsevier. This firm, which is based in the Netherlands, owns more than 2,000 journals, including such top-ranking titles as Cell and the Lancet. However Dr Gowers, who won the Fields medal, mathematics’s equivalent of a Nobel prize, in 1998, is not happy with it, and he hoped his post might embolden others to do something similar.It did. More than...

Takeaway: If you prefer to use vi or vim for command-line editing, you can configure shells to use vi key bindings instead of emacs-style key bindings. Here’s how. By default, most shells use emacs-style key bindings for command-line editing and modification. For users of vi or vim, however, you can instead configure shells to use vi key bindings instead. This is done by editing ~/.bashrc in the case of bash, or ~/.zshrc in zsh and adding:set -o viin bash, and the following for zsh:bindkey -vOnce you have saved either ~/.bashrc or ~/.zs...

Performing manual, repetitive tasks enrages me. I used to think this was a corollary of being a programmer, but I’ve come to suspect (or hope) that this behaviour is inherent in being human.But being able to hack together scripts simply makes it much easier to go from a state of rage to a basic solution in a very small amount of time. As a side point, this is one of the reasons that teaching the basics of programming in schools is so important. It’s hard to think of any job which wouldn’t benefit from a few simple scripts to perform more automation.When we’re h...

Computers store every piece of text using a “character encoding,” which gives a number to each character. For example, the byte 61 stands for ‘a’ and 62 stands for ‘b’ in the ASCII encoding, which was launched in 1963. Before the web, computer systems were siloed, and there were hundreds of different encodings. Depending on the encoding, C1 could mean any of ¡, Ё, Ą, Ħ, ‘, ”, or parts of thousands of characters, from æ to 品. If you brought a file from one computer to another, it could come out as gobbledygook.Unicode was...

Peleus here. In December of 2010, I wrote a blog post describing the first steps towards sandboxing Flash Player within Google Chrome. In the blog, I stated that the Flash Player team would explore bringing sandboxing technology to other browsers. We then spent 2011 buried deep within Adobe laying the groundwork for several new security innovations.Today, Adobe has launched a public beta of our new Flash Player sandbox (aka “Protected Mode”) for the Firefox browser. The design of this sandbox is similar to what Adobe delivered with Adobe Reader X Protected Mode and follows...

The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is specified in RFC 959, published in October 1985. The attempt in this specification is to satisfy the diverse needs of users of maxi-hosts, mini-hosts, personal workstations, and TACs, with a simple, and easily implemented protocol design.That's from the introduction. Does anyone here know what a TAC is? I don't. I had to look it up, since the acronym wasn't even expanded in the RFC. It took three tries in Google, and I finally found it in some obscure Cisco IOS manual -- it apparently stands for Terminal Access Control protocol. Whatever that means. . ...