The original link doesn't work and here there are no comments. They moved soooo fast? A damn conspiracy :P

I am wondering how many people are out there who can't or don't want to take notes?

I almost never took notes. It was already too hard to concentrate and understand the material taught while taking notes on paper. Maybe I am not good at that. I was watching classmates copying everything that is on the table without understanding it and I was doing the same. It's a race where you try to copy as fast as possible all the material written in the board while you don't even have time to breath, not even trying to understand. Anyways, I have hard time to understand things in a lecture, I need more time alone to read it in a slower pace and understand it.

I want one for my MP3 player!

I remember in an interview of JC that he said he was feeling sorry about some good programmers who in their older age they quit programming and became software managers or something similar. Of course for people like JC, programming is something like reaching new frontiers, not just a regular boring job. I like such people in the industry who find a deeper meaning in their programming job. In the past I thought I would be programming till the end of times. But things change and recently I feel like the mid-life crisis is near. I adore people who can still program for fun and excel in their discipline at later age. Because it's harder for the rest of us.

Gamepark GP2X or Wiz already run the GBA at full speed without frame skipping :)

This is still impressive for the DS though. I wonder if it will run in my cart..

Haha, I had a great laugh in this one! I wish I knew how these mod points things work out so that I could give some :P

Me and my computer graphics geek friends spent a lot of times looking at girls and joking how we admire her smooth phong shaded curves or how naturally moving the boobs physics routines work.

It's hard to make a point because there are different kinds of depressions and everybody sees depression from a different perspective.

For example, when I read in the article about ruminations, analytical thinking, being isolated to focus on a single problem, etc,. I identified with all of this. Also, I never thought I have clinical depression (Iirc, the depression that comes without any apparent reason at all, not being sad because you were dumped by your girlfriend or something) but there is some other kind of depression which in my opinion comes because of another chronic mental disease that makes your life horrible. In my case it's obsessive compulsive disorder but not the mainstream one (I don't do rituals) but the unseen one, Pure-O form of it that makes you worry and be ashamed about horrible thoughts that happened to pass through your mind.

The keyword 'ruminations' in the article is also a primary characteristic of OCD (both the ritualistic one and Pure-O) where you are bothered with endless thoughts that go into cycles and you can't let it go. While I had the cycling worries illogical thoughts ("If I trip on the cracks a good person will die" or being bothered by sexual/violent thoughts on people or situations you wouldn't like to have them) the same ruminations went for more "logical" worries (Did I just said something that has harmed someone? What if I forgot to lock the door and be robbed?). Generally, I was overthinking and overanalyzing and worrying about things too much and even if I wanted to tell my brain to shut up it wasn't possible. Add to all these, how they also affected my social life, how I was sensitive and school and being bullied all the time, how things didn't went nice in family too and you have an accumulation of sad experiences, negative thoughts, bad memories, a complex for other people's successful life, an isolation from people, awful feelings about myself and the ruminations continue on all these parts (What am I? Why am I not normal? Why is abnormal bad? Also revolving around "I need to have a life" to "Fuck real life! It's a lie.." and never finding a point of serenity).

They all add up and it becomes more complex, also my personality is based on these thoughts and if I could turn back and become just like the rest I would be more depressed because I wouldn't be me but what people dictated me to be (I had a lot of hate for criticism like "You should get a life! You should be just like the rest.."). It's all a complex pattern. (This kind of) depression is not weltschmerz but a result of a mental disorder that lead (or had very similar characteristics) to overthinking, deeply analyzing, worrying while the rest were just having fun in their ignorance and also a result from the social trauma for thinking and acting different than the rest.

Also, this damn interesting article.

"If you unrolled those loop then the only think you could use to escape had to be a goto in the line right after the end of the unrolled loops"

Sorry, I made a serious mistake here:
Should be ..use to escape had to be a goto (many actually, one for each unrolled line) TO the line right after the end of the unrolled loops"

I had to make bad excessive use of goto since my first qbasic demo ten years ago :)

There are few occasions though where it's the thing to do and one line of it doesn't make the code ugly. Yes, my old qbasic code was horrible (not only because of goto) but few good uses of it doesn't hurt. I find it stupid whenever I see other programmers cringe with the single mention of goto. First they should think if the case of the code where it's used justified it and then think twice about blindly disagreeing.

In an old demo I did for the GP32 handheld there was a smooth juhlia fractal effect I coded (with fixed point arithmetic, mirroring and all that) and I unrolled the loops to gain some more (some would say loop unrolling is senseless but on that hand held there was enough gain to justify). I specifically unrolled the sixteen iteration loops of the fractal algorithm where specific conditions might make it escape abruptly from the loop with a single break. If you unrolled those loop then the only think you could use to escape had to be a goto in the line right after the end of the unrolled loops. Of course someone who hated ugly stuff like loop unrolling and taboo things like goto could just avoid this method at all but I was just writting a demo and I wanted performance.

This is the only case in my code that I had to use a goto (and found it a good and fast solution actually).

I once was chatting with a programmer about female programmers.

He told me (and we were actually having a joke about it) about the bicycle test. If you ask a girl to draw a bicycle, it doesn't matter if artistically it's lame, usually (he said) women will draw a bicycle that mechanically it can't work (the chain will be missing or connected to the wrong part). They will design a piece that it will fail to function (they are missing the details). But most men will draw one that works in the details (petals, chain, right placed). I don't know if it's true but we were joking once about it.

As for programming girls, even if I don't want to spread stereotypes I will tell you my statistics. I once was quite obsessed discovering girls (especially in the demoscene) who can code and I was the creator of some stupid site called "The Female computer entities" (which make me feel silly when I think about it). From all the sample, most of the ones who actually made some good stuff or could even code assembly had something odd happening with their gender. The ones that were more "feminine" were writting the bad stuff and few of them argued that some people don't like their code because they are female (which was not true, I mean about the code stuff not the female stuff). It's like I could guess whether a female has a more male brain by her quality of work at code. Although exceptions might arise. I don't want to spread a stereotype but just to discuss from my experiences.

And thinking about that when a geek friend dreams of an ubercoder girlfriend we tell him to be carefull, joking of course :)

I bow to that!

Yey for story in games!

Actually, now you said 3-10 hours it sounded too much for my current motivation. As I grow up I play games for even less time, like 30 minutes in Mame, SNES or Amstrad CPC emulators and then loose the meaning. Recently I didn't even had the motivation to do that. I didn't like to play the tiniest game (as I wasn't in the mood to watch a movie or read a book and I just slept,.. ahhh midlife crisis?). It's even boring to install bigger games that take two DVDs and crawl on my PC.

So, now I am thinking it I am kinda depressed and overweight for sure, 29 years old and it's so depressing that I am bored to even play a game for 30 minutes. Maybe because I did it once and I find it meaningless? But isn't there something else? Programming for vain glory? Meaningless. Job? Meaningless? Girlfriend? Doesn't have any,.. wait what?!

I guess I need a change in my life..

I sorta agree with that but I'll just need to mention another side. Stereotypes are sometimes here for a reason but then they are enforcing cultural attitudes that individuals follow to belong to a group, which then makes them more true and attract more individual to specific stereotypical way of life and the cycle goes on.

For example, there are stereotypical behaviours, way of life, attitudes for a geek, but then some geeks are identified by these differences and try to act similar to the stereotypes. Then other geeks who doesn't necessary fit the stereotypes at first, are trying to find common links between those with the some hobbies and they follow the same root, trying to match the stereotypes and actually proving them. That's why amongs geeks we like to tell jokes about geeks not having a girlfriend or a life and we somehow feel connected to them. Although we have moved those stereotypes from something serious to something to joke about, some funny identification of our breed.

In a nutshell, it's like the chicken and the egg problem :)

That's exactly what shifted my attention from gaming to wishing to learn programming, during my sixteen. I thought, if I sit down and finish games like the rest of my mates (or at least those who were into computers) I will have accomplished nothing and especially I will have accomplished nothing more than the rest of my geek friends. I wanted something of more importance and something very few had the courage to get into. And that was programming. That's how it started but also became an obsession which lead in other kind of existential crisis like, ok I am an average programmer and there are godlike programmers whom I'll never reach, what's the point. But least it gave me a nice talent in programming and some good job opportunities after ten years into it.

But that's how I started now I am thinking it. I wanted to do something more unique than my average geek friend. I can enjoy gaming but pure gaming and no creativity doesn't cut it for me. Although, existential crisis occured to me even with programming. But it's still a good thing to have as a hobby.