STG's

I've read Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master last week. It was pretty good, although if you have a few years of experience and good practices, you should be familiar with most of what it says, even if you don't follow it in practice :-) . Some of their bullet points are: - Don't duplicate - Write flexible code - Use Contracts, assertions and exceptions - Test - Automate where possible - Use a version control system. Obviously, many of these points have a lot to do with refactoring and XP. They also have another neat book on Automation, Pragmatic Project Automation: How to Build, Deploy, and Monitor Java Apps . Obviously that is much less relevant to a Delphi programmer, but you can still learn quite a bit from it. After I started reading it, I automated large sections of my build and release process (in PHP - it's easy to use in the command-line, too, and some parts are re-usable on the site). It saves a lot of time and enables you to stop worrying if you ...

I recently read Working Effectively with Legacy Code . It was an excellent book. It focus on legacy code, defined as code that doesn't use unit testing - yes, it is a narrow definition :-) . It has an excellent range of techniques for refactoring and getting older code under test, as well as adding features without breaking anything. If you have an older program that you are moving under a testing framework, the insights on the book are well worth the price. In particular, the various ways to get objects decoupled so that you can get them tested without creating a lot of support code are very useful.

In his image (Book One of the Christ Clone Trilogy) *Very* good. The basic premise is based on cells being found still alive in the Shroud of Turin. These cells are used to create to a clone. The pace of the book is excelent, although the nuking might have been a bit excessive :-). Lots of questions unanswered on the end. I've already gotten the second one. Crown of Slaves Yet another Honor Harrington book. Honor shows just a bit on this one, just like on Shadow of Saganami. It was pretty good - Victor Cachat (which appeared on several of the short-story Anthologies) makes a great showing as usual, and the trend of making books on the HonorVerse without the focus on Honor seems to be working well.

Nick Bradbury: Depressing piracy statistic On his blog, Nick Bradbury, of HomeSite, TopStyle and FeedDemon fame, (I use TopStyle and FeedDemon myself) mentioned that the previous week's Feeddemon activations were 90% cracked serials. Ouch. I'm still struggling with the question of adding activation to my own products. Obviously, the big question is if it would add more sales than would be lost by those who hate activation. In Nick's case activation is almost invisible since it has to access the net anyway. My utilities don't so it's bound to be much more annoying...

A couple of days ago, I've started using the excelent FTP Voyager , instead of my *very* old copy of WS_FTP Pro. While it did take a bit to get used to the new interface, it was well worth it. Some of the neat things: - SSH: I feel so much safer - Compression: now my logs are downloaded 90% faster. It's not so much for less repetitive file types, but still a lot on most text based files. - Synchronizing: instead of picking the files that changed manually, just tell it to synchronize. - Scheduling: it's very easy to schedule downloads and synchronization (both sides, server to client or client to server). I've added an item that grabs new log files, for example. And if you don't want to schedule, you can run it manually when you want to. - Multiple downloads/uploads: it automatically generates multiple connections when downloading several files. That saves a lot of time, specially if you are sending several small pages. Support is pretty good too - I...

...and the other reason was Half-life 2. Yes, I hate their delivery system and activation in general (but I'm still thinking whether to use it on my own software or not), but all in all, this is an awesome game. The *LOADING* time is very annoying, but the gravity gun and the neat physics system and the puzzles make it well worth the time spent. Far Cry still beats it on outside views such as jungles and water (and by a lot!), but other than that, HL2 is probably the best FPS shooter ever done. I also like the fact that it must be one of the first major titles to be distributed through the net at launch. I got a few games from Stardock's Totalgaming.net , but they are not anywhere in the same league as HL2. I still would rather have a download system that is less intrusive, like Stardock's, but I guess you can't have everything...

I've just finished reading State of Fear, and it was very good. The best part is easily the enormous amounts of graphs and data on global warming and the consequent discussion on what we know, as opposed to what was made up. Also great were the reflections on the state of scientific research and the increasing lengths to which media will go to increase the scale of turning pure speculation into major scares. The extra essays (on the e-book, not sure about the print versions) were very nice, too. Of course, it also helps that it just being released and I got a 100% rebate on Fictionwise . Some of the particularly scary parts is how much of the nuclear winter theory was made up (but hey, are you in favor of nuclear war?) and the DDT ban. One of the reasons I started posting at the blog again was this book. I just felt the need to post my opinion on such a great book. And the other reason...