Learning, for me, is practically impossible if I'm also not feeling healthy - and age really drives that point home :) As a balance to writing about improving my mind, this area will be about improving my personal fitness, which I believe comprises both exercise and food. fit·ness noun /ˈfitnis/  The... Continue reading

After checking in the previous version, I realised that it might be nice to support wide Live Tiles as well (tile templates are here). It seems that you can wrap your square tile into a wide tile and send one notification each time. Also, our logo images didn’t look very... Continue reading

I think the current reader count of this blog is one: me. So there's a good chance no one will realize I've switched themes. But, after struggling with adapting TypePad's "Simple White" design for a while, I've given up and switched to Pico. And there's already a blog with that... Continue reading

The default live tile for our application is rather unappealing. Surely there’s something better we can do with our 150x150px than that At the very least, we want to fix the title and display the current generation. Maybe some more ideas will come to us while we’re implementing them. To... Continue reading

Our cooking/coding/kick-ass little group, Freshly Coded, has a graphics wizard: Nick. He is the magic behind all the nice UI and crazy-fast graphics you’ll see over on our joints project page. Normally I stick to developer-driven testing, refactoring / architecture, and regular coding but this time I’m going to try... Continue reading

Relax. Step back. Try to divine the true nature of the problem. The object is not to count neighbors and check cell states as quickly as possible; that’s just one possible implementation. The object is to determine when a cell’s state must be changed and to change it appropriately, and... Continue reading

We left off last time with a naive working implementation of the Game of Life using XAML under Metro. When Abrash did his first profiling, it turned out the bulk of time was spent determining a cell’s next state and so he explored that path. Our situation is different. And... Continue reading

I remember discovering Michael Abrash in the early 90s and being amazed with both his writing style and the crazy amount of speed he produced from “slow” machines. When I started researching this project, I was quite excited to remember he had written two chapters (17 and 18) in Graphics... Continue reading

A couple days ago, Dave (a fellow chef at Freshly Coded) and I were talking about Windows 8 apps; I was hoping to find something simple/completable that could make it into the App Windows Store. After some discussion, I settled on Conway's Game of Life with two goals: There are... Continue reading

At the end of Chapter 8 of Agile Web Development With Rails, there is a seemingly innocuous exercise that says: Write some functional tests for the product maintenance application ... Sounds easy enough :) And I like writing tests. Yes, I'm weird that way. The existing tests are all happy-path.... Continue reading

I admit it: I'm a Rails noob. 100%. Totally. As a result, this post may be useful to 0.000001% of all starting Rails developers out there. A while ago*, I pre-purchased Agile Web Development With Rails and for some reason decided to try it out this morning. Of course, as... Continue reading

It's been a couple years since I blogged with any frequency, but over the last few months I've had more and more thoughts that I want to record (and share) so I'm taking the plunge again :) The difference this time: less about day-to-day activities (Facebook and Twitter can handle... Continue reading