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Domain: mounthamill.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to mounthamill.com.

Comments · 7

  1. Web 2.0 performance costs by spikeham · · Score: 5, Insightful · on High Performance Web Sites

    In the mid-90s Yahoo! pared down every variable and path in their HTML to get the minimum document size and thus fastest loading. You'd see stuff in their HTML like img src=a/b.gif and a minimum of spaces and newlines. However, back then most people had dialup Internet access and a few KB made a noticeable difference. In the past few years, mainstream Web sites pretty much assume broadband. Don't bother visiting YouTube or MySpace if you're still on a modem. Aside from graphics and videos, one of the main sources of bloat is Web 2.0. Look at the source of a Web 2.0 site, even Yahoo!, and often you see 4 times as many bytes of Javascript as HTML. All that script content not only has to be retrieved from the server, but also takes time to evaluate on the client. Google is one of the few heavily visited sites that has kept their main page to a bare minimum of plain HTML, and it is reflected in their popularity. If you visit a page 10 times a day you don't want to be slowed down by fancy shmancy embedded dynamic AJAX controls.

    - Spike
    Freeware OpenGL arcade game SOL, competitor in the 2008 Independent Games Festival: http://www.mounthamill.com/sol.html

  2. Just use NUnit instead for TDD in VS Express by spikeham · · Score: 1 · on Microsoft Vs. TestDriven.NET

    Microsoft owns Visual Studio and the MSDN. They have the legal right to demand that Jamie Cansdale not modify their product and remove his MVP status. However, it's unfair and shortsighted. TestDriven.NET made doing Test Driven Development (TDD) of .NET code significantly easier. Cansdale is handing Microsoft and .NET developers a valuable tool for free. If Visual Studio Express is aimed at beginner developers, MS should be happy to help them get started with best practices by being able to do TDD.

    One reason for Microsoft to behave this way is that they have introduced their own unit test framework in Visual Studio Team Edition. It's not unlikely that the designers of the Visual Studio test framework looked at TestDriven.NET as an example of how unit testing should be built in to Visual Studio. Serious developers know the importance of doing TDD and will pay for an IDE that supports it. Cansdale is undercutting their sales opportunities by permitting developers to do TDD for free in the Express edition.

    Cansdale should stop tickling the tiger, forget about integrating TestDriven.NET into VS Express, and provide a separate interface for VS Express users to use TestDriven.NET to test their code without going through the Visual Studio GUI. No integration, no license violation.

    Chapter 8 of my book Unit Test Frameworks http://www.mounthamill.com/about.html describes how to use NUnit to do TDD of .NET code without any need to integrate with Visual Studio. NUnit is one of the testing frameworks supported by TestDriven.NET.

  3. Moore's Law is a heuristic, nothing more by spikeham · · Score: 1 · on Does Moore's Law Help or Hinder the PC Industry?

    Like Murphy's Law, Moore's Law is a heuristic rule of engineering. "In general, the computing power of a commercially available CPU doubles every 18 months." Trying to define this specifically in terms of number of transistors, MIPS, processor speed, etc. is silly. The specific technological advances that drive Moore's Law are diverse, driven both by incremental improvements in existing technologies, such as shrinking die sizes in chip fabs, and occasional leaps of innovation, like multi-core CPUs. Representing them as a smoothly increasing exponential function is a massive oversimplification for the benefit of laypersons and Wall Street.

    ** Check out free Windows OpenGL screensavers at http://www.mounthamill.com/ **

  4. go ahead, write your own games by spikeham · · Score: 1 · on Was Videogaming Better Back in the Day?

    This article is just lame and defeatist. If game developers listened to this kind of argument, no games would ever get written. If you've got a cool game concept, work on it. If it's good, eventually you will take it to the point where it can go commercial. Even if it doesn't get that far, you can enjoy following your vision and learn valuable skills. Many game developers started out playing with a concept for kicks with no hope of ever taking it to market.

    I wrote my first game on a C64 in the late 80s. It was a text based adventure game written in BASIC, a fan tribute to Star Wars. Gave it to a few friends to play, then accidentally formatted the floppy with the source code. Oops. But I enjoyed writing it and it got me started as a programmer.

    For the past 2 years my hobby project has been a Windows arcade style game, Sol, a sort of Galaga 3D. Not only has developing the game helped keep programming fun rather than just being wage-earning drudgery, but also I've learned marketable skills in graphics, interactive design, build systems, coding techniques, etc. After writing a video game from scratch, creating simple 3D GUIs and many other types of apps seems easy.

    As an individual developer, you can write your own games. It would be tough to match the amount of creative content in commercial games: complicated levels and scenarios, large amounts of artistic graphics, hordes of characters, libraries of sound effects, etc. But you can create a game that is playable and fun. You can achieve the same sense of satisfaction as in the old days. If your design and marketing skills are good, you can sell your game and make money. Simple web-based or phone games are still within the reach of one developer. If the type of game you're creating would require a larger team, you can still be a lone wolf: create a playable prototype, then sell or license the concept to a game studio or publisher.

    Check out the current prototype of Sol and some free screensavers at http://www.mounthamill.com/. Feedback welcome.

    - Spike

  5. Another good reason to use OpenGL by spikeham · · Score: 1 · on Will the Lack of DX10 on XP Spur OpenGL Dev?

    This situation exemplifies the reality of using Microsoft tools for any kind of development, not just 3D graphics. Use Microsoft dev tools, face vendor lock-in, non-portability, and rewriting your code every couple of years when they release a new iteration of their products and deprecate the old APIs.

    I wrote some free Windows screensavers ( available at http://www.mounthamill.com/ ) using GNU dev tools (gcc, make, cygwin) and OpenGL. They work great on Windows XP and 2000. I can even build and run them on Linux although haven't made the effort to deploy them as Linux screensavers.

    From my experience, any game developer could use OpenGL and free/open source tools to develop code. There is no graphics effect you can do in DirectX than you cannot do in OpenGL. A few specialized effects may be slightly easier to implement in DirectX. OpenGL is easier to use, in general. If you go with DirectX, you will be required to build a more complex engine to deal with differences between different Windows versions. You also will be required to shell out thousands of bucks to buy MS Visual Studio and associated dev tools (not to mention the cost of Windows itself.) Total investment to build a 3D graphics application using OpenGL and GNU tools, $0. Difference to users, none.

    I assume all the developers who did choose the MS tools either had business motivations to be aligned with MS, or were targeting the X-Box and thus mandatory usage of DirectX. MS buys the companies that publish the most popular games (e.g. Blizzard, Bungie), forcing them to use the MS dev tools. If that's not sufficient evidence that the MS tools would lose in a fair competition, what is?

    - Spike

    Free Windows screensavers http://www.mounthamill.com/

  6. Another good reason to use OpenGL by spikeham · · Score: 1 · on Will the Lack of DX10 on XP Spur OpenGL Dev?

    This situation exemplifies the reality of using Microsoft tools for any kind of development, not just 3D graphics. Use Microsoft dev tools, face vendor lock-in, non-portability, and rewriting your code every couple of years when they release a new iteration of their products and deprecate the old APIs.

    I wrote some free Windows screensavers ( available at http://www.mounthamill.com/ ) using GNU dev tools (gcc, make, cygwin) and OpenGL. They work great on Windows XP and 2000. I can even build and run them on Linux although haven't made the effort to deploy them as Linux screensavers.

    From my experience, any game developer could use OpenGL and free/open source tools to develop code. There is no graphics effect you can do in DirectX than you cannot do in OpenGL. A few specialized effects may be slightly easier to implement in DirectX. OpenGL is easier to use, in general. If you go with DirectX, you will be required to build a more complex engine to deal with differences between different Windows versions. You also will be required to shell out thousands of bucks to buy MS Visual Studio and associated dev tools (not to mention the cost of Windows itself.) Total investment to build a 3D graphics application using OpenGL and GNU tools, $0. Difference to users, none.

    I assume all the developers who did choose the MS tools either had business motivations to be aligned with MS, or were targeting the X-Box and thus mandatory usage of DirectX. MS buys the companies that publish the most popular games (e.g. Blizzard, Bungie), forcing them to use the MS dev tools. If that's not sufficient evidence that the MS tools would lose in a fair competition, what is?

    - Spike

    Free Windows screensavers http://www.mounthamill.com/

  7. Now Google is paranoid about fraudulent clicks by spikeham · · Score: 1 · on Google Accused of Benefitting From Piracy

    Now it seems Google has swung to the opposite extreme, being very paranoid about clicks possibly being fraudulent and not crediting ad referers. Not too long ago I put some Google ads up on a free screensaver site http://www.mounthamill.com/ and have gotten a significant number of legitimate clicks, but Google disallows a lot of them for no apparent reason.