Life Beyond Fife

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Real Life and Video Games
follies•

Real Life and Video Games

At university, the "What do you study?" ice-breaker didn't really work so well when your answer was "Computer Science". However, a historian friend of mine was by contrast frustrated at how open ended her subject area was. "So maybe no-one's particularly interested by what you do but when I say what I study it's always, 'Medieval History? Oh, I've heard of a King...'." In a similar vein another friend of mine is a 3D artist making Playstation 3 games and he suffers from strangers "educating" him on what would make a good game. I know most of us have artistic...

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coding•

Caveats on actually using async and await

With the next release of .Net making a big push for parallelism-for-everyone-made-easy, I thought I'd take this opportunity to see if it really is as simple as they say. The most recent issue of the MSDN magazine has three articles regarding the changes to the Clanguage and what goes on under the hood when the programmer uses the new async and await keywords. This article looks at the challenges I faced in modifying an existing codebase to take advantage of the new functionality. .Net 4.5 Asynchronicity 101 I'll cut through some of the Microsoft boiler plate that builds up as...

8 min readRead more →
Simple WPF IronPython Application
coding•

Simple WPF IronPython Application

A project I recently started working on required me to install Python on my development environment - something I've not relished doing in the past. But with previous restrictions relaxed I was able to pick whichever version of Python I liked so I chose the .Net implementation: IronPython. Here's how I got on... Many developers love Python and one of the reasons given by most who do is that the formatting is nice. I disagree. I miss the closing curly brackets that clearly separate one class, one function from another. My most common keystroke in Visual Studio is probably <Ctrl>+K,...

7 min readRead more →
Environmentalism and Amdahl's Law for the Masses
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Environmentalism and Amdahl's Law for the Masses

Though Life Beyond Fife is primarily a technology blog this article is for everyone. Absolutely all. I want every single person in the world who is the least bit concerned with environmental matters to know about and understand a concept from the world of computer science known as Amdahl's Law. With this one bit of knowledge it will make you much more effective at looking after the planet for tomorrow's new generation. Right you're still reading, excellent. I can now confess to you that I don't care about the environment myself. That's not to say I doubt how drastically the...

11 min readRead more →
D-Lighted: The lightweight, multi-platform database tool
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D-Lighted: The lightweight, multi-platform database tool

D-Lighted is a free, open-source Windows database tool that allows users to connect to multiple different database platforms all from within the same small executable. The simple, uncluttered user interface is perfect for DBAs or developers who need to get into a database quickly, open up a table and check the data, add or delete a row, or edit some values. D-Lighted currently supports connections to Microsoft SQL, MySQL (thanks to MySQL's .Net Connector), SQLite (thanks to System.Data.SQLite), Oracle and PostgreSQL (thanks to pgFoundary's .Net Data Adapter for PostgreSQL) but visitors to this blog are free to request more in...

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Carpenters make tables and chairs, not hammers and saws
essays•

Carpenters make tables and chairs, not hammers and saws

Ok, yes, I know it's actually furniture makers who make tables and chairs but the title is long enough as it is. Just consider the point for a second though. Imagine the carpenter who has a problem with a broken saw or possibly a hammer that could have a better design for the type of nails they're using. Do you think they crack open the welding torch or start on a new hammer mould? Of course not, they are carpenters - skilled at creating objects with wood. That is their business, what they have trained long and hard to be...

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