No 'var' on class fields in C#

This is why you can't have nice things...

Seriously, I struggled with this issue for two days before I wrapped my head around it:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2009/01/26/why-no-var-on-fields.aspx?wa=wsignin1.0

Composition versus Inheritance

As I try to become a better programmer, I find myself tackling (for me) new coding paradigms.  Lately, I have been struggling to learn about the difference between composition and inheritance and when to use which.  This exhaustive Stack Overflow hits a lot of good points:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/49002/prefer-composition-over-inheritance#_=_

GDC Diary 2

Wow.  Never expected GDC to be so exhausting!  I'm not even going to any parties.

I have been noticing several trends:

• Mobile (and making money from)
• Virtual reality
• Alternative controllers
• Reaching an international audience
• Diversity (Actual the audience is much more diverse than I thought it would be.)

GDC Diary 1

Wow.  Talk about sensory overload.  I didn't expect GDC to be so big!  Everybody here reminds me of people that either attended the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science or the Cal Arts Character Animation Department.  My main problem is that there is almost too much to see and do.

I was pleasantly surprised that the Video Game History Museum had an Atari exhibit.  Haven't played Missile Command in ages!

Fixing homebrew after installing Yosemite

Well...well...installing Yosemite broke homebrew.  Big surprise.  I figured out how to fix it by checking out:

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/153790/how-to-fix-brew-after-its-upgrade-to-yosemite

>$ brew

/usr/local/bin/brew: /usr/local/Library/brew.rb: /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/bin/ruby: bad interpreter: No such file or directory

/usr/local/bin/brew: line 23: /usr/local/Library/brew.rb: Undefined error: 0

>$ cd /usr/local/Library

>$ ls

Aliases/       Contributions/ ENV/           Formula/       Homebrew/      LinkedKegs/    Taps/          brew.rb*

>$ git pull origin master

...bunch of stuff...

Then you can run 'brew update'.

Understanding Python's With Statement

Turns out the 'with' statement in Python is fairly straight forward.  Here is an article (oldie but goodie) that gives a quick thumbnail sketch of how that statement works:

http://effbot.org/zone/python-with-statement.htm

On another note, this is the first blog of the New Year!

Parsing Excel with Python

Cos sometimes you don't want to deal with xml, csv, json or any other text format.  Check out https://openpyxl.readthedocs.org/en/latest/.