zacharyc

If your watching TV, you’ve probably seen that the Olympics are going on right now. I have been watching more than my fair share of Olympics. One constant frustration for me is the continual mention of Michael Phelps. He has done some great things, like win 8 Gold medals in a week. He is truly a phenomenal swimmer, but I don’t like him as a role model. In 2004, after the Olympics were over, Phelps was arrested for a DUI. He was sentenced to 18 months probation and instructed to give several speeches to locals schools about the negatives of driving under the influence. That was the end of it. There has been relatively no mention about Phelps’ DUI in this Olympics. Why? I would think it is because they don’t want to tarnish Michael Phelps during the games. He is supposed to be a role model, someone everyone aspires to be. How would parents feel if they knew that the person their kids were looking up to had committed a DUI? Is that the same role model? ...

John Gruber nails it: Apple’s biggest problem isn’t with its product quality (which, overall, remains very high), but with its communication to customers. If your reading this blog, you probably know that I’m a big Apple fan. I will stand up for Apple all over the place, but I have been increasingly frustrated with their communication, this needs to change.

Wil Shipley wrote a blog post on the Mojave Experiment whereby Microsoft “proved” that Vista is a great operation system. I think Wil makes a couple of really powerful points in his article, but there is one that I feel he leaves out. These people were shown what they thought to be the NEXT version of Windows. I think there is probably some tolerance built in for people looking at what they believe to be the next version. Something like, “If this OS was ready, they’d be shipping it already, so this probably just some sort of prototype.” If they said you had to use this OS, starting today until the end of time, I’m sure they would have had more questions and perhaps formed a very different view on the whole situation. ...

Mint.com is a financial site that allows you to log into one system to see all of your finances. Basically, it is as if you were able to take all your separate accounts and move them to one bank view. It’s really quite interesting, and I”m excited about getting on top of all my finances on a daily basis. Also of note, it has a really good feature to tell you if you are saving money or losing money over the past 6 months. Even though I’m still in debt, I was very excited to see that I was still going in the right direction! ...

Ran into a fun situation today where I was writing some code, and I came across an interesting situation in C++. Now, before I get to the end of this post, I’ll give you the punch-line, Developer stupidity. So I was working on a exercise where I needed to write some sort of state machine. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 enum STATES{ STATE_1 = 0, STATE_2, STATE_3, ... }; /* ... some other code ... */ switch(state) { case STATE_1: // Do something state = STATE_2; break; case STATE_2: // Do some other stuff state = STATE_3; break; case STATE_3: // Do the last state of stuff // This code never gets called. break; } In this code STATE_3 is never reached. The code for the enum was working fine, but the state wasn’t being reached. I went over this for a while, until I found out the problem. ...