James R Twine Blog

Author: James R. Twine

  • Short People and Big Cars

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    James R. Twine
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    Having driven a decent amount of miles for my age, in a variety of vehicles ranging from motorcycles to my mom’s double-cab dually with a six-horse gooseneck trailer, I can truthfully say that one of the most scary things out there are people driving vehicles that are way to big for them. In general, I…

  • You know you are fat when…

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    James R. Twine
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    If you are one of those people that deep-down really knows that they are fat, but still kinda hope that you are not as fat as you think, or worse yet, you are one of those people that really is fat, but you do not think that you are, here is a real simple acid…

  • NULL != NUL

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    James R. Twine
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    I continue to find it rather amusing that even (so-called) experienced developers will use fundamentally different concepts interchangeably, even after doing this for so long. For example, I have seen documentation by developers that mention nul values in a database table, or worse yet, NULL-terminated strings, and NUL pointers. Now, some that simply miss the…

  • Resources

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    James R. Twine
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    Arcade Repair-Related Resources PAC-MAN Information (similar hardware) http://www.csh.rit.edu/~jerry/arcade/pacman/ Arcade Game Over http://www.arcadegameover.com/board_repair.html Coin Operated Video Game Conversions http://www.marvin3m.com/video/ Pac Man Info (very detailed and very technical) http://users.erols.com/mowerman/pacfile.htm Pac-Man Hacks http://www.purecope.com/pacman/index.htm Romident http://www.system16.com/romident.html

  • Unknown Atari Kangaroo Board

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    James R. Twine
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    Atari Kangaroo – After watching the attract mode for a little bit (~30 seconds), the game started to show some visual artifacts on the RHS of the screen. They were horizontal blurbs that looked like multicolor static. However, each of the blurbs, while in a random vertical location, were identical.

  • Non-NYC Taxicabs…

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    James R. Twine
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    Well, I had to get thee minivan repaired (the AC died), and I had to call a cab to bring me back to the home office so I could get stuff done. What I miss about living in The City (NYC, as opposed to A City, like Boston), is the ability to hail a cab…

  • Top of the Food Chain, Baby!

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    James R. Twine
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    Something that has always bothered me… I have always considered Software Developers to be pretty much at the top of the food chain when present in a software company. And that is not just because I happen to be one! Please allow me to explain… If you are a software company, then your whole business…

  • 7th-Day Laws…

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    James R. Twine
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    One of the things I never understood were the so-called “7th-day laws”, at least from the religious side of things. Now, I am by no means a fan of (US) organized religion, but if you believe that God created man in His own image, then would He not want man to grow? To accomplish greater…

  • C-Hash, C-Pound, C-WHAT?

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    James R. Twine
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    A recent discussion raised the fact that C#, often called “See Sharp” is technically incorrect because the symbol used is not the musical symbol sharp, but is the octothorpe, also known as Pound, Hash, Splat, Number Sign, etc. An example of the differences is shown here (provided your browser and current font set support it). …

  • Educated Opinion .vs. Knee-Jerk Reaction

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    James R. Twine
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    Ever make a comment regarding the performance of applications written for the .NET platform, or about Java’s performance and/or, God forbid, the current system requirements of most large-scale J2EE implementations, only to have some dumbass jump on you about how your comment is just the typical knee-jerk, “C/C++ elitist” reaction to the word “Java” (or…