Spotify/FastDelegate Rabbit Hole

I have become quite the fan of Spotify, but my arse has become increasingly chapped by the "can't play track" errors it's been giving me lately. A quick conversation with my dear friend, Mr. Google, revealed that I should probably empty Spotify's disk cache.

Like a good little user seeking the path to the disk cache, I went to the Spotify "Help" menu, at which point the good little programmer in me was overpowered by curiosity and clicked on the "License" menu item. It turns out that those guys use quite a bit of F/OSS code! By this point, the obsessive-curiosity (which makes me spend 3 hours on Wikipedia following links) had taken over, and I was spittin' new Chrome tabs aster than you can say "OCD much???".

Of the several projects I ended up learning about, "FastDelegate" gave me the most brain-food. Maybe it's because I live a little further away from the metal, maybe it's because I've never actually been paid to write C++ (except for that one time, but I was young & needed the money...), whatever the reason, this head-first submersion into C/C++ function pointers, member function pointers, compiler nuances, and all the blood-n-guts that drove these folks to make "FastDelegate" kicked my brain off its candy-ass treadmill in the Managed Code Fitness Center, and put it on a 40 mile forced march with an Assembly Code rifle in its back!

Oh, as for the Spotify error messages - deleting everything in the disk cache cleared that problem right up!

Muscle Memory

So that's what it's called - muscle memory! I remember the first time I tried to do a quick "copy/pasta"* from an actual piece of paper (2004, Naples), as well as the first time I caught myself typing "&&" into a not-programming-related e-mail** when I meant to say "and" (2007, Tallahassee). It's also what makes it hard for me to concat strings in PostgreSQL (since everybody knows that "||" means "or").

So what about you? What sort of muscle memory, repeated motion, ritualistic routines have you nurtured at work, only to have them show up uninvited to your meatspace party?


  * If you thought that was a typo, I suggest increasing your 4chan-related depravity.
** Yes, those do exist, albeit increasingly rarely.


P.S. - Thank you, Mr. Google, for helping me bring the words "muscle" and "memory" from the tip of my tongue all the way to the tips of my typing appendages...

Interview: Google's F/OSS Boss

Some German tech site posted the transcription of an interview they did with one Chris DiBona, the Free/Open-Source Software boss at a little boutique tech shop called "Google" (perhaps you've heard of them...?). I found it to be pretty interesting, overall. It's not one of those "Micro$oft suxor - FreeBSD rulez!!!!1!" shit-slinging monkeyfests, which is a relief. Rather, it's an informative discussion about the tech and tools they use inside Google (including closed-source), as well as their approach to F/OSS licensing, contributions, etc, and how they came to adopt such an approach.

It's not Earth-shattering, it's not revolutionary, but it's a good read and that's enough. Feed the computer in your head - read it!!!

Google: "Android is the Linux desktop dream come true" - Suchmaschinen - derStandard.at › Web

(Did I mention that it's in English? Thought that was nice of them...)

Technology And Moral Panic

OK, call me lazy. Go ahead, really - say it out loud (so that your cube-mates question your fragile grip on reality) - "You are sooooooooooo friggin' lazy, James!" Why? Well, instead of expending the neural electricity to "think" or "write something", I'm just going to post a link to something someone else wrote. An Interweb version of "re-gifting", if you will...

Women And Children First: Technology And Moral Panic - Tech Europe - WSJ

But seriously, that right there is a really nice, short little op-ed eye-opener. Feed the computer in your head - read it!!!

Obligatory favorite quote:

There was some wonderful stuff about [railway trains] too in the U.S., that women’s bodies were not designed to go at 50 miles an hour. Our uteruses would fly out of our bodies as they were accelerated to that speed.

Thank you, WSJ!!! Articles about flying uterii are always welcome here!

Virtual Functions

As a combat veteran very experienced professional software developer (server admin, network admin, change management nazi, DBA, architect, glorified typist, coffee lackey, punching bag, and whatever else needs to be done), the overwhelming majority of my career has been built using Microsoft stuff, most notably .NET. The main reason I (and others) have such a hard-on for .NET (or its archetype Java) is the managed runtime. To put it simply - no goofy "pointer arithmetic" for us humans to screw up! But, after all these years of building things inside the warm, loving safety of .NET's fertile womb, I've found myself sneaking closer and closer to the edge,  yearning to get right next to the metal. That's how I ended up finding the article for which this post was created:

12.5 - The virtual table

Until now, I had never really spent any time mulling over questions like "I wonder whether the implementation of a virtual function gets resolved at compile-time or at run-time?" or "I wonder if there is another human on this planet that gives a shit, much less wants to read a blog post about it?". But hey - today's a new day, and I decided to throw caution to the wind and run with it!

But seriously, that "part 12.5 out of some presumably multi-part C++ thing" up there is pretty friggin' sweet, if you ask me! (I know you didn't, so please STFU...) It explains the real, "under the hood" implementation of virtual functions in such a clear, concise, "plain-speak" manner that I left with a newly gained ability to picture it in my head, almost as a set of 3D puzzle pieces fits together. It is elegant simplicity at its finest. And you know those asshole interview questions about niche subtleties of polymorphism that nobody ever encounters in Real Life? Well, if it involves class foo overriding the virtual function of class bar, you'll never miss it again!

P.S. - I never knew that pretty much all functions in Java are virtual! Weird!?!?