I probably wasn’t the only one surprised to see EA announce an online racing game back in 2001. Motor City Online was an interesting twist on the MMO genre. The early 2000s were boom times for MMOs, especially MMORPGs like Ultima Online, Everquest and Asheron’s Call. However, genres other than RPGs were relatively uncharted territory, and being a fan of the Need for Speed series, I signed up for the beta.

I sometimes forget how fast C is. Until I am working on a problem with reading thousands of numbers from one file, sorting them, and writing the results into another file.

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$ time groovy PartialPhoneFileSort.groovy 0 250000  
groovy PartialPhoneFileSort.groovy 0 250000  15.88s user 5.67s system 123% cpu 17.413 total

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$ time ./a.out phonelist.dat sorted.dat 0 250000
./a.out phonelist.dat sorted.dat 0 250000  0.13s user 0.01s system 99% cpu 0.141 total

Touche´ sir. Touche´. But then again…

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$ wc -l < PartialPhoneFileSort.groovy 
    29
    
$ wc -l < phonefilesort.c 
    74

Yesterday, under considerable consumer pressure, Microsoft decided that non-transferrable Office 2013 licenses weren’t such a hot idea. Back in August, they decided not to use “Metro” in case a company with the same name decided to sue them.

Since it seems that Microsoft will cave into any (sometimes non-existant) public opinion, let’s use this opportunity to just shitcan Windows and be done with it.

There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.

I think I know of a culprit for the latter case.

As an ignorant American, I can only guess what celebrating Australia Day is like. I salute you Jacko, and not just for your work with Energizer batteries.