WingedPanther

My adorable wife has been writing fan fiction for decades, and introduced me to the art fairly recently. In the world of fan fiction, there are not a lot of quality sites for sharing your stories. You can post them on a blog, but that's a good way to never get them read. For a long time, we've used fanfiction.net, since it's the largest repository, and much easier to work with than the second best site, mediaminer. Recently, she found a new site, ficwad, that seems to be the real answer to what ...

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One of the things I'm always looking to do is increase my programming skills. What I find interesting is how the focus of that improvement has changed over the years. I'll try to trace through the areas of focus, and why I believe they require a change in perspective for each one.

The most basic level is to learn procedural programming. It doesn't really matter whether it's Java, C, C++, Pascal, or something else, almost everyone is first a procedural programmer. Every method in ...

Recently, in the course of doing some Beta-reading with my wife of some fanfiction stories, it became apparent that it would be really helpful if we could each add our comments at the same time, and independently.

Google Wave was the obvious tool for this. Unfortunately, loading it on dialup is a bit ridiculous. OK, it's a LOT ridiculous. Nice software, but the bloat is almost impossible to deal with.

After a little bit of research, I next tried AbiWord. It's a ...

I decided a few days ago to take a serious look at Haskell, and started yesterday. I cracked open a tutorial at http://learnyouahaskell.com/ and started playing with GHCi.

Haskell can bend your mind. It appears to be based on the model of Turing Machines called Recursive Functions. There are no variables, only n-ary functions. A nullary function is a constant. Other functions produce output in a deterministic manner.

The only non-deterministic functions are the ...

As many of you know, I use Delphi quite a bit at work, and also like using jEdit for my code editor. Yesterday, I started looking at what it would take to build projects from command-line so I could just work in jEdit for everything except form layout.

This is where things got ugly. It turns out that Delphi provides two incompatible methods for compiling a project. The first method is to build your project from within the IDE. This will use all of your settings for third party ...

The full title of the book is Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm,Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides. Before I start, I'll warn you that the copyright on this book is from 1995. As a result, the ideas in this book should not be news to you.

Unfortunately, they were. This is the book that answered the one question I've always answered my biggest question: "What's so darned special about OOP that means it makes software reusable ...

In the course of becoming a programmer, you reach a point where you feel like your problem isn't with knowing the language. This is where a book like this comes in. It's a list of practical tips for improving how you approach the process of programming.

It includes a list of 70 tips (such as learn a code editor well). These are organized around several major techniques. Prototyping is one, incremental development is another. If some of these techniques seem contradictory, they ...