Rocking out with a big plastic guitar will soon no longer be purely the privilege of the console owning masses, as Aspyr announces an exclusive deal with Activision to develop and publish Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock for the PC and Mac platforms this fall. Not only does this open up the game to a whole new segment of players, but if you've got a nice gaming laptop it essentially makes this the first portable version of Guitar Hero. On top of all of the regular features of the game, Aspyr's version will allow PC and Mac users to battle against each other in online multiplayer, perhaps allowing us to settle the Mac versus PC debate once and for all in glorious rock combat! Bring it on!

I still lose more games than I win, but as long as I've slept and eaten recently, I don't lose because of head-slapping tactical errors. Better still, I am recognized in the club as someone who will punish my opponents' tactical mistakes brutally.

Chess players study tactics by means of puzzles. A typical tactical puzzle has a picture of a chessboard with a few pieces, and a single sentence problem description: "white to play and win," or something similar. Tactical puzzles are not generally taken directly from actual games. Instead, they are simplified or idealized from real games — pieces which aren't relevant to the problem are removed, for example, and the real game elements of time pressure and personality and so on are completely removed.

"Yes. I believe the equivalent is reviewing code on paper. Not necessarily literally on paper, but in isolation from the compiler, the schedule, the politics and everything else that comes with a professional software project. Just the code. Unlike chess, the problem description is always the same: "how can this code be improved." Ignore the big picture, the product, and high-level software objectives such as performance, portability or reusability. Just think literally: how can the *CODE* be improved, from the perspective of a human reader.

And just like the chess player solving a tactical puzzle, arm yourself! In chess, there are names for all of the common tactical patterns. Fork, pin, skewer. Discovered check, driving off, piling on. The list goes on a bit, but it's finite. In the same way, there is a jargon for describing code quality in much more concrete terms than the all-too-common (and uselessly vague) "bad smell". There are the basics: use meaningful names, keep it simple stupid (KISS), don't repeat yourself (DRY), be consistent, and so on. Then there are more complex quality issues like cohesion, coupling, information hiding, referential integrity and separation of concerns. Challenge yourself to use the correct terminology, both in describing problems and in suggesting improvements.