Intricacies become lost in the ink.

It really all started with Katamari Damacy (塊魂). The music for that game is so darned infectious, and it was my fascination with that music that prompted my colleague to loan me the CDs his wife bought while she traveled through Asia. I already mentioned China Dolls (中國娃娃). Another of the CDs in the colle...

When should you mark a method as virtual? This question has both a technical and a philosophical aspect. The technical aspect is well-understood: You mark a method as virtual if you want calls to the method to be invoked on the run-time type of the invoked object rather than on the compile-time type of the invoking reference. But there is a heavy...

Although the inflections and compound-mania are largely absent from the English language, there are still some vestiges of its Germanic roots. One detail of English grammar that I often see neglected is the distinction between the verb+particle and the compound noun. Consider the verb phrase "to shut down", which is the one I see misused most ofte...

I was talking with someone last year who had a gripe about a music organizer program. Suppose you create some playlists and then decide, "Oh, nevermind, I don't like this playlist." You highlight the playlist and click "Delete". You then get a dialog box that asks, "Do you want to move the songs in this playlist to the Recycle Bin?" "Well, no, I d...

It is generally accepted that language exposure in the first year of a baby's life is important. To what certainly must be the dismay of couch potatoes everywhere, researchers at the University of Washington determined that it's particularly important that it come from a live human being. Watching DVDs doesn't have any effect. What was particula...

Consider this follow-up question to the question from last time: When I call the function, can I assume that the field of the structure will not be modified? If we take a look at the declaration of the function, we see that it reads like this: Go past all the function declaration specification goo and look at the parameter list. It's a ...

In the aftermath of the Zidane head-butt incident, there was a lot of speculation over what Materazzi might have said to provoke Zidane's response. Zidane has said he attacked Materazzi because he insulted his mother and sister. Materazzi denied disparaging Zidane's mother. I immediately noticed the very precise denial from Materazzi. (I suspec...

Everybody should know by now that you have to free memory using the same allocator that you used to allocate the memory. If you allocate with then you have to free with ; if you allocate with then you have to free with . Once you've internalized this rule, you can use it to draw other logical conclusions. Consider: When I call the function, wh...

Late one morning, the fire alarm went off at work. Everybody dutifully filed out of the building and waited for the all-clear signal. A few of us looked at each other and said, "Let's go to lunch." "I'll drive." "Shotgun!"