Occasionally, I see a video recommendation or stumble on a blog post about inheritance in programming. For those who don’t know, object-oriented programming languages usually allow an object to be defined as a “child” of another object. For example, you could define a “vehicle” object and then create…
Continue readingThe Linkage app uses a simplistic simulation algorithm that has some weaknesses. I’m not talking about the issues around links with three connections to the rest of the mechanism where each connection would need one of the others simulated before it could be simulated (being simulated means all…
Continue readingI like programming in Swift, but the language designers made one choice that I disagree with. In fact, I strongly disagree with it. Here are two sets of code that do the same thing (assuming Swift were to allow the second bit of code to work). Which one…
Continue readingI had trouble getting this to work. Actually, I had no trouble getting it to work – I had trouble finding the necessary information online (documentation) to tell me how to do this. This is one of those things where I’m never sure how the first person to…
Continue readingPax Pamir is a ruthless game. During yesterday’s game, my friend often commented on his bad situation and how losing his cards was terrible. I coached him to a win by reminding him of unfamiliar options. One such option was to switch loyalties to the same faction to…
Continue readingI’ve been dealing with this issue for years. I want a Swift custom view class based on a .xib file. That means the .swift file contains the logic for the class, but the definition of the contents, such as text fields, icons, constraints, etc., is in a .xib…
Continue readingI recently told someone that the Windows version of the Linkage app has 30,000 lines of source code. I didn’t get a chance to explain what all those lines of code do, but I want to explain where they all come from in case anyone finds it interesting….
Continue readingEvacuation is a board game where players evacuate a planet that its ever-increasing solar energy will burn up. The Evacuation will take four years, each year being a single round in the game. This game has some unique mechanisms I haven’t seen in other games. The rules in…
Continue readingI just got a new Slip Roll machine. It’s from Vevor, a company whose motto is something like “Touch Tools, Half Price”. It seems to be fairly accurate. This slip roll was about $200.00 and can handle 16ga steel according to its specs. I rolled some brash sheet…
Continue readingFirst, let me say that writing software is not usually heroic since doing it is usually not a risky endeavor. I’m using “hero” as more of a colloquial term for a person who has a huge success, sometimes against the odds. While working as a lowly programmer at…
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