Life Beyond Fife

Engineering from the glorious Kingdom

All Posts

Explore all articles from Life Beyond Fife - Page 18

max(e^pi, pi^e)?
follies•

max(e^pi, pi^e)?

Greetings new blog readers and functional programming aficionados. The theme of the content here is rather varied so you're unlikely to see any more functional programming articles for a while. Choosing the next topic for a new audience is crucial though and despite having a couple of ideas I decided to go with the mathematical / coding one. My experiences and advice on effective software development with team members thousands of miles away (told from my personal experience on both sides of the fence ;) will have to wait until next week. Instead I'll talk about a simple mathematical interview...

10 min readRead more →
follies•

Functional Programming For Object Oriented Programmers

After recently remarking about how I finally "got" functional programming I was asked by one of my millions of twitter followers... ¬¬ to write up an explanation of a small Fprogram spoken in terms that fellow O-O programmers would understand. Before I become too entrenched into the functional programming way of thinking, that is, and can't explain it anymore. As a former tutor this is one of the major problems with being able to teach something once you understand it. You've forgotten how not to make sense of the concept and what finally helped you get over the mental parapet....

12 min readRead more →
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...

10 min readRead more →
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
essays•

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 →