Bitwise Magazine

Review

AC3D 6.0

3D Graphics

Saturday 15 July 2006

AC3D is a low cost 3D graphics modeller and editor. Within a multi-window environment it provides a large range of tools to let you create 3D objects.

There is even the option to render them in AC3D itself, though you will need a third party program such as POV in order to do this. AC3D 6.0 :: $69.95 Inivis Ltd. http://www.ac3d.org/ Free 14 day trial version available Requirements: Windows 95, 98, ME, NT 4, 2000, XP or Linux x86 Pentium 120 (or equiv) minimum 64 MB RAM minimum 10 MB free hard disk space preferable, but not necessary - 3D accelerated video card with OpenGL drivers Mac OS X 10.3 or later The main attraction of AC3D is as a design tool for creating objects to be imported into other graphics programs where they can be rendered, animated or incorporated into games. Say, for example, you are creating landscapes in a design program such as Bryce or Vue. With the help of AC3D you could design spaceships, houses (...)

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Dogs, Blogs and eBooks

Rants and Raves starts a new era and the cat gets a new friend...

Tuesday 11 July 2006

It’s a curious thing to see your own words written in a language which you can’t understand. That happened to me just today when I received an eBook written in Brazilian Portuguese.

This is a language of which I must confess a complete ignorance. I can get by in French, pass the time of day in Welsh, even say a few words in German, Chinese and Italian (the latter confined largely to such conversation stoppers as “Your tiny hand is frozen” and “Women are fickle”) but Portuguese of any description is a language in which I could not even do something as simple as ordering a cup of tea for me and a saucer of milk for the cat. Speaking of which, you probably won't be in the slightest bit interested to know that my dog has acquired a cat. But heck, this is my blog, so I'm going to tell you anyway. Actually, it's not the dog who has acquired the cat but, rather, the other way around. The cat, who officially belongs to my next-door neighbour, has (...)

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The Match Game

Thursday 6 July 2006

Do you know whether the complete bipartite graph K_3,3 is planar or not? This was the mystery speculation that occupied our minds one spring during recess periods in junior school...

Of course, we hardly knew what the word planar meant, and we never breathed the qualification “complete bipartite graph”. Well, a graph is a sort of model, and the form it takes in this instance is a network: several shapes with lines connecting them. The specific graph that absorbed our time and attention featured three shapes resembling houses, and three big circles, one marked “G” for gas; the next “E” for electric; and finally one marked “W” for water, each representing a utility station. Each house needs all three services, so individual lines should connect each service with each house. The puzzle's challenge is to draw these lines – nine in total – without having any line cross another. Every graph with more than (...)

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REALbasic 2006 Professional

With the demise of Visual Basic 6 is REALbasic an alternative?

Saturday 1 July 2006

One of the consequences of Microsoft’s abandonment of the old-style Visual Basic is that there is now room in the world for Visual Basic clones. Previously, you would have had to have been slightly peculiar or have a very good reason indeed for not using Microsoft’s Visual Basic 6 (VB6). After all, it was the standard for components – thousands of them available to do everything from graphing and charting to database access. But now the hegemony is gone – shattered. And the gap has allowed other Visual Basic plants to bloom…

You start off in REALbasic with a fairly standard IDE environment. It's a good bit cleaner looking than the Visual Studio equivalent. REALbasic from Real Software isn't simply a VB6 clone. It does have a VB6 like syntax, but it is its own Basic, so to speak. While the language is pretty similar to VB6, it is in fact object oriented. This shows up immediately if you try to use a VB6 style date in REALbasic. In VB6, a date is intrinsic to the language while in REALbasic (as in VB .NET) it's a class. However, apart from things like that, REALbasic is much nearer to VB6 than VB .NET is to VB6. In general, old style VB programmers won't take too long to get used to the REALbasic dialect. When you start REALbasic, you'll see a rather plain IDE style environment. Double clicking on the (...)

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Editorial July 2006

All Change...

Saturday 1 July 2006

You will notice this month that more and more of the features in Bitwise are starting to appear in BW2 – the section which I like to call our ‘colour supplement’. The two regular opinion columns, Dermot Hogan’s Bytegeist and my own Rants and Raves have both migrated to BW2, as has Wilf Hey’s Mathematical Digressions. Heck! Even the Editorial has moved here…

So what exactly is BW2 and how is it different from plain Bitwise? From the reader's perspective there really isn't a great deal of difference. You'll be reading features written by the same writers, there will still be code to download from the programming articles – even the layout of the pages hasn't changed much. From the point of view of the editorial team, however, the changes are enormous. Up to now, Bitwise has been published entirely in the good old fashioned way – by laboriously designing each page in handcrafted HTML before uploading it to the site. The links from one page to another and from the Index to the articles have also all been hand crafted. In BW2, on the other hand, much of this is automated. That's because BW2 is created using SPIP – a (...)

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Bye-Bye Bill

Bill Gates’ Vision runs into a blind alley...

Saturday 1 July 2006

So Bill is going. Well, not until 2008. OK, he’ll still be chairman. For life, of course. It reminds me of the Cheshire Cat, except that Bill doesn’t smile, he has a Vision. I suppose this ‘retirement’ is as good a point as any to look at Bill’s ‘vision’ and see where it’s got us. Before Bill and his Vision, the only people that had visions were old testament prophets and those wired to the moon. Unfortunately for Microsoft’s competitors, Bill was (and is) neither.

Bill's Vision can be roughly translated as cheap processing power everywhere (running Windows, naturally). The Vision has changed a little over time as technology has moved forward; I wouldn't have thought that the original Vision included the XBox, but still, Bill has kept Microsoft moving forward, brushing aside every competitor from Netscape to the mighty US Department of Justice itself. Where are Marc Andersson and Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson now? Who cares and judging parking offences, respectively. But Bill? Bill is moving towards replacing Mother Teresa. Amazing. For better or worse, Microsoft has transformed the way we live and work. There have been a few assistants, of course. Moore's Law doubling the power of a chip every 18 months was essential. The incompetence of IBM (...)

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Ruby For Rails

Wednesday 28 June 2006

Ruby For Rails
Manning : www.manning.com/black
ISBN 1-932394-69-9
$44.95 / £31.99 (or $22.50 PDF ebook)

If you frequent Ruby programming forums and newsgroups as much as I do, you will no doubt have read many posts from newcomers wanting to know if they need to learn Ruby in order to use Rails. It's true that the Rails framework makes it easy to create basic web applications without writing much, if any, code. However, if you really want to master Rails development, there is no escaping the fact that you must be able to program Ruby. Fundamentally, learning Rails without Ruby makes as much sense as learning .NET without a .NET language. David A. Black's book, Ruby For Rails aims to bridge that gap. While the book concentrates on Rails development, at every step of the way it delves into the inner workings of the underlying Ruby code. In seventeen chapters and just under 500 pages, it (...)

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Programming, Methodologies and Buzzwords

This month Huw casts a suspicious eye on agile programming and concludes that its supporters may be its greatest enemies…

Tuesday 27 June 2006

Folks! Do you want the miracle, fun, way to lose weight effortlessly? Do you want to smoke, drink, do no exercise and have a body like a top athlete? Then we have great news for you – with our new, easy, fun way of dieting, you can eat like a pig and watch the pounds simply drop away…

Yes, I know, you'd have to be one banana short of the bunch to fall for that. OK, so let's try another tack. How would you like to program by writing less code, less documentation, getting everything done quickly and having fun while you are doing it? Folks, welcome to Agile programming… This word ‘agile' is bandied about all over the place these days. Often, it's used as a weapon with which to beat about the head old fogies like me. “I really need a good debugger,” I say. “Nah,” comes back the quick response, “Debuggers get in the way. They aren't agile.” “Ah, well at least, I guess I can get by with a decent editor with code collapsing and code completion…” - which prompts the irritable response, “Code (...)

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Using This Site

How to find articles or downloads and leave comments

Monday 12 June 2006

BW2 is more ‘interactive’ than the older parts of the Bitwise site. It lets you find articles according to section, author and keyword and you can also leave comments in the form of a threaded ‘discussion forum’ beneath many of the articles. To help you make the most of this site, just follow this guide…

Finding Articles There are lots of ways of getting around this site and finding the articles, downloads and debates that most interest you. The latest articles and news items will always be listed on the front page. To read the article in full, just click its title. Printing Articles If you want to print an article, click the ‘Format For Printing' link just above its title. This will load the article text and pictures into a new window without displaying the site graphics. This provides a cleaner format for printing. Leaving Comments Down at the bottom of many articles, there is a link to ‘Comment on this article'. Click that to leave a message. If there are already messages from other users these will appear in boxes beneath the article. If you wish to comment on one (...)

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The Hell That Is Linux (Installation)

or ‘How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love (well, at least not hate) XP’

Monday 12 June 2006

I hate M$, really hate it, hate it with a passion. I would dearly love to use Linux for many reasons, because it’s Open Source, to play with all those lovely toys I’ve read so much about (programming tools, OpenGL, etc.), just to try it out to see what all the fuss is about, to bask in the Nirvana that is Linux, because it’s not M$.

From time to time I try to install Linux. Over the last three or four years I've made about ten attempts on two different desktop systems and a laptop. Invariably, it trashes my system. In the past, I've been able to undo the damage in a day or two. However, in my latest attempt, Linux seems to have permanently trashed my hard drive. No personal data was lost but I face the prospect of buying a new drive and re-installing and configuring a hell of a lot of software. Thank you, Linux, I'm a geek with no real life, I didn't really want to do any real work. Cleaning up your mess is my true purpose in life. I like to think that I'm fairly intelligent. I have a good degree in Computer Science with Electronics. I've worked with computers of one sort or another for over 20 years, I've been (...)

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Garden of Gilbreath

This month Wilf conjures with a mathematical mystery of magic...

Monday 5 June 2006

Some years ago a quite astonishing observation about things taken in order was noted and exploited for fun in various conjuring tricks: one early investigator into this phenomenon was the famed stage magician Karl Fulves.

Within a few years the observation was analysed and documented by Norman Gilbreath, famed for his mathematical analysis of “semi-ordered systems” for the RAND Corporation. Gilbreath is also an avid conjuror, noted for creating some classic illusions of “magic”. This combination of interests is not so unusual when you realise that a deck of playing cards is itself an ideal model of a semi-ordered system. Imagine you have two tubes, each of which can contain snugly a stack of draughts (or chequers). When you tip a piece out of either tube, only the one at the top of its stack can drop out, leaving the piece below it as the new top. You tip out from these tubes exactly two pieces – it doesn't matter whether or not they come from the same tube. When you (...)

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Welcome To BW2

...the Bitwise colour (or, if you prefer ‘color’) supplement!

Monday 22 May 2006

This section of the Bitwise site is still in its infancy and at the time of writing there isn’t too much to see here. However, that will all change over time as we add more and more features to BW2.

There is one major thing that sets BW2 apart from the main Bitwise site: in a word ‘interactivity'. Here you will be able to ask questions or make comments on articles simply by clicking the ‘Comment on this article' link beneath the main text. You should be aware that your comments won't appear immediately as they have to be approved by an administrator. This is in order to avoid ‘comment spam' – the plague of all Internet forums and blogs. Don't worry: we don't plan to censor comments unnecessarily. Just as long as you don't advertise sex, drugs, surgery, gambling and get-rich-quick schemes, you should be OK! I hope that, as it starts to fill up with more features, you will find that BW2 adds a new dimension to the Bitwise site. Best wishes Huw (Bitwise (...)

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Bit Shifting in Visual Basic 6

Monday 22 May 2006

In Visual Basic 6 there isn’t a ‘bit shift’ operator. However, you can implement something that does the same job quite easily.

One of the problems with Visual Basic 6 (VB 6) is its lack of operators. An operator is often ‘syntactic sugar' – that is, there is another way of expressing the operation using a function call. For example, the C && operator (AndAlso in VB .NET) can be simply replaced by two If statements. On the other hand, some operations are fundamental in that they are executed by machine instructions – division and multiplication, say. If these aren't in the language, there's not much you can do about it. But there are other operators which, while not in VB 6, can be reasonably easily simulated. Bit shifting is one such. Bit shifts are the movement of the bits in a word or a byte by a given number of places left or right. They aren't commonly used in database (...)

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