Microbits

Why is Chrome (Google’s web browser) a little tarnished? I’ll just quote Wikipedia:

Chrome sends details about its usage to Google through both optional and non-optional user tracking mechanisms.

Non optional user tracking mechanisms? That’s completely unacceptable. I can see why Google would want to try that, but I’d hope that someone at Google would know enough to say no [insert word of choice] way. At least Chrome is open source, so other people can strip out the Spyware that comes bundled with Chrome.

I’m a little disappointed in Google, a company that I think has been representing the moral high ground for the computing industry for the past few years. However, it would take an anchor the size of the US federal deficit for Google to sink past Microsoft or Apple.

While you don’t see them every day, bitwise operations are important. Everything at the hardware level is represented in binary (base 2, 1 and 0). Bitwise operations allow programmers to operate directly on the bits used by variables. This is very useful with enums, since you can have one variable be multiple values.

To understand how one enum variable can be multiple values, you need to understand the bitwise AND and OR operations.

An OR operation compares two sets of bits. If either bit is 1, the result is 1, else, result is 0. In the below example, set 1 is the value of enum option 1, and set 2 is the value of enum option 2.
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Remember that linker error I posted about a few days ago? I think it was caused because I didn’t put double include protection (aka include guard), not the “inline” stuff I talked about in that post.

If you have several old PCs lying around, you could turn them into a grid, a single computer that uses all their resources together.

I haven’t found a good use for a grid personally, but I found a nice piece software to setup a SSI (Single System Image, basically means one OS running on multiple machines) grid, and a nice tutorial.

If I had a grid running MySQL, the 35 million row DB table I use would probably search pretty fast.

In other news, Panda3D (a game engine, usable from C++ or Python) looks like it has excellent documentation, something that a lot of engines are lacking. I’m also wondering if I should buy a Mac now that Snow Leopard is out (that’s when I said I’d buy one)… I wonder if I’d really use the Mac applications…

I think this is conclusive proof that people have way too much time on their hands. People are “outraged” over a change in font on a furniture catalog? Seriously? You guys need something worthwhile to work on.

I just got one of the strangest linker errors from VS08 (update on the error here). I put a basic function in a header file, not realizing that it would become an inline function. The linker complained that I had defined a symbol twice, which wasn’t too helpful. After moving the function to the cpp file on a hunch, everything linked perfectly.

In other news, Doom3 is turning out to be a lot of fun, and I’m annoyed with Apple for not providing decent bluetooth support on the iPod touch. Wireless earphones only? Seriously…