Nuno Silva

Red Alert 3

Red Alert was one of the games that marked my childhood. I remember when i first got a computer one of the first RTS games i played was red alert. And i loved it!

Now it’s time for Red Alert 3. New game design takes this game forward with the possibility to construct your bases in land or see. A lot of new units (one of my personal favorites is the tesla trooper and the vacuum bomb :D) that can be used both in land or see (yes, most units are amphibious ).

Nothing like seeing a gameplay demo in red alert 3 official site, here.

You can also see the promotion video here.

Defenatly a “must play” game!

4 Reasons not to use the out keyword

The out keyword causes arguments to be passed by reference. This is like the ref keyword, except that ref requires that the variable be initialized before it is passed

in: MSDN C# Development Center

This post objective is to point out 4 reasons why you shouldn’t use this keyword in your regular C# programming:

1st Reason

It obligates the programmer to make code around it’s usage. Example: if you want to call a method with an out keyword, you must declare a variable first.

2sd Reason

Now imagine you decide that the method should have 5 more parameters? And you think: “If i have one, i can have 5 more”. Now you have to declare 6 variables before the method, insert 6 variables into the method signature, and the obligation to set the variable before the end of the method.

it’s the diference between this:

int var1;
int var2;
int var3;
int var4;
int var5;
int var6;
Something(out var1,out var2,out var3,out var4,out var5,out var6);

and this,

MyObject obj = Something();

3rd Reason

Methods that have outs in the signature are more dificult to use than the ones that don’t use them(see the code above).

One of the things that i hate are signatures of methods that have 5 or 6 out parameters and, from those 5 or 6 i only want to use 2 of them (for example).

In those cases, i am always obligated to declare the 6 variables, because we really need to pass all of them to the method. If a return object/struct is used, this problem doesn’t apply.

4th Reason

It’s Syntax! Ugly until the end… Yes is easy to use, but it makes unreadable code… Especially because most of the programmers use and abuse of it.

“How will i return this values? humm, making a nested struct or class is so dificult!!!!! I’ll just use the out keyword”

In Resume…

There is always a way around. If you have more than one return value consider the usage of a struct or a class. The code will be cleaner, more readable and all of your methods will be easier to use by other programmers.

Firefox 3

It’s public. Almost every blogger made the announcement. A request was made by the mozilla team in order to beat up the world record. 8 million Downloads in 24 hours. In a few days we will no if the world record was beaten up or not.

Firefox 3 is really good. Fast, a lot faster than it’s previous version both in it’s load time and loading the pages.

But it has a huge drawback… Seams like the the mozilla team changed something with the plugin engine. Maybe that was part of the strategy to speed up the load time. One thing is true. The plugins i use most don’t work any more:

• Firebug
• Colorzilla
• Google Browser Sync
• Javascript Debugger

In fact the most important plugin above is, without doubt, Firebug. I hope an update is released soon because if that’s not the case, i must make a downgrade into Firefox 2.

UPDATE: Looks live there are several updates that i didn’t noticed.

For Firebug there is a beta release available. Get it here (Thanks Mário for the reference).

For colorzilla there is also a beta version. as far as i tested it works fine. Get the beta here.

Google sync unfortunately doesn’t have an update. I hope i comes out soon.

Finally Javascript Debugger has already new version updated for Firefox 3. I really don’t know why Firefox didn’t updated this plugin automatically.

Fascinating!

The video below is a hope for all the people who lost an arm (or both). It’s fascinating how they can convert the thoughts of a person into the electrical impulses needed to move the arm (video after the break)

Hello World

Hello world is usually the first program a programmer writes.

Here is a collection of 373 “Hello, World!” programs in different programming languages: link

Selectors in Mooltools

For reference, in Mootools there are 3 types of selectors:

• $$ - selects all the elements in the page.
  Example: $$(’a') - selects all the anchors in the page
• $ES - Does the same thing as $$ but an optional parameter can be passed to refine the selection.
  Example:
  $ES(’a') - Same thing as $$(’a');
  $ES(’a',’something’) - selects all the anchors inside the element with the id ’something’ ($(’something’))
• $E - same thing as $ES but it only returns the first element found. Example: $(’a',’something’) - returns the first anchor inside the element with the id ’something’ ($(’something’))

Prince of Persia

One of the games that marked two game eras was Prince of Persia. Everyone remembers that fantastic platform game that we used to play in our 486. it was wonderful!

Fortunately, Ubi had the nice idea to make a remake of the game. This remake became a trilogy:

• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
• Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within
• Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones

I’m currently playing the 2º game (Warrior Within) and one thing i have to say: it’s brilliant. The fights, the moves, the ambiance, all it’s magnificent.

And one thing i recommend: Play all the 3 games in their order because they form a story.

Because of the great success of the 3 games of Prince, Ubi decided to create a fourth installment of the game. Probably it will be released for PS3 and PC (just like the 3 games above).

This new installment doesn’t have a name (yet), but it has some shots and concept art. For the fans, here their are:

You can find more informations about the new game at it’s official website.

Asirra

The best way to describe Asirra is to tell that it is a capcha with images. Well, it’s not really a captcha, but it serves the same propose: Challenge the user to prove that he is human.

Asirra uses images of cats and dogs has a challenge. The user only has to select the images that correspond to the cats and it’s done. The images come from a partnership between Microsoft research and Petfinder.com.

It’s interesting because, beside the obvious functionality (protect websites from spam), it also helps Pet Finder organization to find new owners for abandoned pets (notice, in the image below, the adopt me link).

You can see the official page of Asirra at http://research.microsoft.com/asirra/

The most versatile word in the english language

Star Wars: Clone Wars

As a fan of Star Wars it gives me great pleasure to present another star wars movie:

Well, it’s not a movie like the others. At least not with real people. It a animated movie, computer made, with a style similar to the TMNT movie.

The story takes place between episode 2 and 3. You cannot figure much from the trailer, but at least you can see that Skywalker has a Padawan, there is a new Sith, a girl, and the plot is related with the kidnap of Jabba the Hut’s Son.

Here is the trailer: Yahoo

Release date is set to August 15, 2008.