The Savvy Coder's Blog

The blog about coding, art, gaming, music and that old past time of philosophy! var _gaq = _gaq || []; _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-12769862-3']); _gaq.push(['_trackPageview']); (function() { var ga = document.createElement('script'); ga.type = 'text/javascript'; ga.async = true; ga.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https://ssl' : 'http://www') + '.google-analytics.com/ga.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s); })();

[savvycoder]

Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.

Pablo Picasso

[savvycoder]

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.

Anais Nin

[savvycoder]

Favourite YouTube Channel - Yogscast

So here is my favourite YouTube channel to date. Two English guys whose humour and voice over's will keep you entertained for hours! 

Yogscast

http://www.youtube.com/user/BlueXephos http://www.youtube.com/user/yogscast2

[savvycoder]

Agile Software Development is the way forward! Watch this 8 minute video that explains Scrum software development, a type of agile development which is quickly being adopted as the chosen way to develop good quality software.

As an extra incentive for you, the developers of Minecraft - the number one indie game, use this style to develop their worldwide hit. Quote from website: "Waterfall is dead, long live agile!" (http://www.minecraft.net/about.jsp).

[savvycoder]

The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.

Socrates

[savvycoder]

x86 Assembly - Something a bit different

Assembly is cool! Being one of the most basic of languages, it is very low level but there are some really fun things you can do with it. Ollydbg is a windows compatible debugger which allows you to view .dll and .exe files in their most basic assembly format. Its available free from http://www.ollydbg.de/

Essentially from here you are able to modify executables after they have been compiled, and make adjustments to them. In addition you also get an understanding of how a program runs, this understanding along with memory scanners can allow you create trainers that modify the memory to create things like cheats for games.

Memory scanners are a great start for any beginner to learn how to modify a program's memory in real-time. Highly recommended for starters is TSearch 1.6b(http://wpepro.net/index.php?categoryid=4), this easy to use trainer also contains powerful breakpoints/hardware breakpoints along with scripting of assembly to defeat issues like DMA (Dynamic Memory Addresses) in memory.

After you get the basics of that, Cheat Engine (http://www.cheatengine.org/downloads.php) is worth a look. It is more powerful than TSearch and is constantly being improved upon.

Now I understand that you may be thinking that's probably not the best way to learn assembly. However by using the memory scanners you will get an idea for how memory works within a program at the lowest-level, that coupled with decompilers/debuggers you should get a good understanding of assembly.

Obviously you will need some sort of cheat sheet for the commands used in assembly, so here is a good one to get you started! http://www.jegerlehner.ch/intel/IntelCodeTable.pdf

[savvycoder]

A Coders Font IS Important!

So you can write hundreds of lines of great code, but does is it good to look at? You might spend hours looking at code, and if its your job that will probably be a lot! When I finally realised that there were such things as font for programmers I went about trying to understand what the best style to use are.

It turns out fixed-width/monospace fonts are the ones to look out for, you have probably seen Courier being used a lot because it fits this requirement. However that's about the only thing it does well, I was looking for something that looked a little better...

Now, understandably choosing a font is always down to the individual and my favourite font doesn't even feature on this excellent post of the 'The Top 10 Programming Fonts' http://hivelogic.com/articles/top-10-programming-fonts/. 

My favourite is called Bitstream Vera Sans Mono and comes from the Gnome Project, it can be downloaded from here http://www-old.gnome.org/fonts/. I've used it for several years in many different programming languages, and find it visually easy to read and very clear at many different sizes of font. Here is a screenshot of this font being used within Eclipse, language being Java.

Would you not agree its pretty sweet!

[savvycoder]

Essential Tools in Eclipse - Java

Lets kick off this blog with some codey codey stuff! First up, some Eclipse goodness!

Eclipse is one of the best tools to design and create some great Java programs, its free and best of all there are some great free plug-ins to help you!

These are just some of my favourite ones that you can install for free, I've saved hours of time with these. First of all however get yourself a copy of the new Eclipse 3.7 http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/. The Eclipse Classic edition is a good choice for now.

Now on with the tools! To install these you need to go into Help -> Install New Software in Eclipse and add these addresses into the location. Some of them are downloads, and give instructions on how to extract and install them manually.

ObjectAid http://www.objectaid.com/update - Generates class diagrams from .java files, extremely useful for creating quick class diagrams based on your written code.  

FatJar http://kurucz-grafika.de/fatjar - Creates executable .jar files with ease, with options like One-Jar!

JAutoDoc http://jautodoc.sourceforge.net/update/ - Automatically comments on all Java code, it also tries to guess what the comments will be based on the name of the method. Probably the most useful aspect though is the consistency you will get from the commenting blocks.

Subclipse http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.6.x - SVN Plugin, there are a few different SVN plugins but I always settled on this one as it does crash as often! Great for backing up your code on an subversion server.

LogBack http://logback.qos.ch/download.html - Coloured console in eclipse. This plugin took me ages to find, it was key in debugging a console program I had, it recognizes key words from the System.out.print and highlights those specific lines.  

Eclipse-check-style Integration http://eclipse-cs.sf.net/update/ - Check source code style. This gives you an output of how good your code is based on things like best coding practices, so a method that is way too long might be flagged for example.

Eclipse Metrics http://metrics.sourceforge.net/update - Counts source code lines and lots of other interesting statistics!

Having recently finished my computer science degree with a heavy emphasis on Java and Eclipse, I can say with confidence they have attributed to a lot of success! My favourites being JAutoDoc, ObjectAid and Subclispe:). Enjoy!

[savvycoder]

"When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece"

John Ruskin