C++ == ++Pain
I am using C++ for over 6 years now but it still surprises me permanently. You can say what you want about C++ and its ancestor C but you cannot say that the journey is ever over while you stick with it. I am constantly learning while working with it. My relationship with C++ is hard to describe, as it is paved by swearing and hatred but also love and honor. I love it’s wide spread soul, that wherever you go and find some code example of anything it is almost always available in C/C++. I love C’s pure nature, which offers every bit of performance you can get out of the hardware if you just know how to do it right…
Yeah exactly here is where the pain begins. If you don’t quite know how to use it, you are very fast at a point of massive confusion and desperation. Your code is not working, the compiler spits out one stupid unrelated error message after the other misleading you to look for the error at completely wrong places. Your code works far from performance optimized cause you don’t know how to use references and pointers correctly. Even worse… it crashes randomly exactly because you don’t quite know how to use those bloody pointers. It is not giving more than a glimpse by telling you that you corrupted the heap somewhere and some when, but God knows where and when exactly. And hey the preprocessor confuses you ? Wait until you use a statical library build with other defines than the code using the library, if you are lucky (sense the irony) these defines are used to alter the classes and structs inside the lib just to please you with some more confusing stack corruptions at runtime, yehaaa.
The good thing is that all these mistakes tend to happen to a C++ coder just once in a lifetime, cause the debugging of those evil myrmidons is such a mess that it burns itself deep down your brain. All in all C++ is not all that bad as it might sound now, cause i must admit - like almost every c++ coder i guess - that once you made 90% of those mistakes you only avoid after actually making them you start loving the language. C++ is like a women, it honors you for taking your time to get to know each other and not giving up on it afterall. 
For me it is almost too late to be able to love any other language ever again, cause i tried a lot and i always thought i could do better, but still i almost always had to realize that just the one i spend so much time with already is the one that gives me all i need in terms of flexibilty and performance. Till death do us part…
We won…
- Our team
Its blogging time again… Hurray!
It’s been long since my last post but my spare time has been rare and now that my annual holiday is approaching i am going to take the time writing updates, finally.
What happened during the last months? Well first of all we, and by “we” i mean the company i am working for, won a great prize for our latest released game titled: “The Settlers - Rise of Cultures”. We won “Best German Strategy Game 2008″ on last years German Developer Awards. This category is ruled by the gamers and consumers themselves so its the most motivating award i could think of cause it definitely means the game was fun for the people to play. I must say i am proud to know i was an integral part in creating this fantastic game. Compliments to the whole team of Funatics.
Stay tuned for quite some updates soon. I am just starting to catch up
Gym gone wild
Hey guys and girls,
waaz up with the world today ? Yeah pretty lame kickoff i know, but hey i am just practicing. In fact i am really wondering what might be up with the world nowadays. Well i have to admit i am regularly visiting the gym. It really become an addiction, for one part of feeling better through training and being more healthy and all that, but for the other part it is awesomely funny too.
Every time I be there i feel like a little kid in high school again, I am watching a tiny foreign microcosm from the outside, I am eagerly following the ado of all those different characters. One part in me is desperately in shame of what it sees and the other is laughing from the inside though not allowing the slightest sound to leave my body through any cell.
Anyway i am convinced to be able to categorize most of the people in a gym by a few simple indications. First of all I gonna start with those most boring species, which I personally hardly spend any attention to. I am talking about those like me who are really seriously in a gym to get fitter and to stay in shape. The species of people I am talking about is defined and most easily recognizable by
- the fact that we are often alone in there and actually do not find that anyhow boring. Or
- just simply by the fact that most of the following aspects are not applicable to us.
The second stereotype i am proud to present is the poser macho. Most of those are pumping their self full of steroids and work out while watching their egos and arms grow almost simultaneously. They often appear in herds. I will not go into any detail but those herds are commonly a microcosm of its own, with the elite, the aforementioned macho and the worshipers following every step of the kings hoping that some of the so envied muscle mass is passing down to them as well not knowing that they have to sacrifice their brains and testicles for it. Bummer, i guess everything has its downside .
Okay lets move on to the girls, often they are the only silly reasons for species number two, the macho, to go to the gym at all. Well of course some are really seriously working out there and they belong to boring species number one then but the border to species number three is sharp. Species number three is the mad-work-out-girl, most of the time they are recognizable by their extraordinary good shape and their almost crazy work out load. They are so heavily trying to burn every little piece of fat under their skin, not only forgetting about the health-decrease coming with that but also not realizing the fact they are already far from being attractive to most of the men. Though it was almost always men why they were starting to work out from the begin with. For me this is a sad picture and i pity them though praying for the day that every one of these are finally finding their prince charming to wash their brain free of those mislead ideals.
Time for the girlie species. In my eyes they are kind of the most funny stereotypes i can define. I doubt that anybody out there ever visited a crowded gym without having seen one of those. They also kind of want to find their Mr.Rights but in contrast to those of species number three, they also try to find them inside the gym. Well at least that’s the vibe they are sending by working out while wearing rings and metal all over the place (not ALL over the place, that would be the “dark Gothic” species) but they strongly appeal the idea of wearing something different for sports than for going out to a dance hall. They are even painting their faces right before working out with a thick heavy duty waterproof make-up. Picture their faces while running on a treadmill, trembling, almost near to cry just ONE simple thought on their minds…”please don’t let my make-up blend !”. I advice those to better take it slow so they wont sweat at all.
Seriously what is wrong with the world today ?
A new blogger in town…
After nearly two years of not further improving my old website i now finally switched to a blogging system. I must say i am kindly amazed by how easy it was to setup wordpress and adding the desired plugins that i consider necessary for a blog of a programmer. All in all it took me just about a few hours to get a cool design and everything else to work.
I now gonna add content here step by step so that this blog not only serves as a portfolio of mine but also as a platform to pollute others minds with my froward opinions :).
Stay tuned…
