Monday, 8th September 2003
Short stories
Cory Doctorow has a new book of short stories coming out, and has released six out of nine of them under a creative commons license following the success of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I just finished reading Craphound and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Hinting
I’ve always wondered how fonts work. I now have a much better understanding of the technology involved thanks to Microsoft’s excellent Typography site, in particular this Introduction to hinting from 1997 (via ).
“Is Evil..” titles are evil
Too excellent articles on Object Oriented Design: Why extends is evil and Why getter and setter methods are evil. Ignore the inflammatory titles: the subheading of the second article, “Make your code more maintainable by avoiding accessors”, is a much better indication of their content. I picked up some great tips on proper use of OOP from reading them. In particular, the section on CRC cards made something click which hadn’t clicked when I looked at them earlier this year for my ill fated University software project.