Daryl Ducharme 10/23/11 Daryl Ducharme 10/23/11

Who we f'ing need right now - Just Another Magic Monday

I follow a lot of different people on Twitter. One person I follow is David Copperfield. Recently he retweeted a post from someone else.

In these tough times, who we need now is David F**king Copperfield: bit.ly/qL4C0P #amen

Being intrigued, I followed the link and took a look at the premise of the post. Here's a little taste of the premise of the article.

These are dark times we’re living in, kids. Wall Street is occupied. The current GOP presidential “frontrunner” thinks was totally kidding when he said we need an electrified fence between the U.S. and Mexico. “Whitney” got a full season order. Yes, our collective mood is just short of “F*** this noise, we give up.”

What we need is a pick-me-up. What we need is a who, someone to come along and lift our spirits and make us smile, even if what we’re smiling at is an illusion.

Who we need is David Copperfield.

The original poster is right. In these tough times we do need David Copperfield - or someone else like him. Do you remember when he made the Statue of Liberty disappear? Walked through the Great Wall of China? Well the original poster does, along with quite a few other bits of business he performed.

Here's a link to the full article. This article has links to the following great tricks and illusions:

[ad#Ellusionist] All of these are great illusions that David Copperfield brought to us in the past. I loved watching all of them. However, in the comments, there is a hidden gem. In the comments someone mentioned a parody of Mister Rogers's Neighborhood that he did as a routine. It is quite an entertaining bit of magic. The quality is low but it comes across fine.

Here it is, David Copperfield parodying Mister Rogers. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dj5dCnbLQSg&w=480&h=360] So what are your thoughts. Do we f***ing need David Copperfield right now? Is there someone else you'd like to see take his place? In my opinion, these performances stand the test of time. He is a true master magician. There are new, younger performers out there but can they produce timeless classics such as these? Let me know what you think in the comments below.

Daryl Ducharme 3/18/11 Daryl Ducharme 3/18/11

Flash Friday - A Simple List

A few people who've worked with me in a programming job may have heard me talk about how a custom list should be done. For performance reasons you don't want to recreate the visual "cell" n-times. That could lead to all sorts of unforeseen problems. Instead you want only enough cells to be visual during scrolling and as you scroll through the list just bring the "cells" round to the other side. One of the people I work with, Alec McEachran, wrote a blog post on just this topic. It is entitled "A Simple List" and I'll let you read his article and code on the subject. What is interesting about his code for a list is he does a great job keeping the list class very simple. It keeps to a pretty narrow responsibility. He's quite good at solutions with well defined class responsibilities.

In our current project, Monster Galaxy, we have used this code in a few places. It has been modified for our purposes but at the base level described in his article the code makes custom list designs easy to implement.

Alec is a very intelligent programmer and has some other great articles on his blog. If you like what you read there you might also like to follow him on twitter (@alecmce). Of course, his twitter feed carries a lot more of his opinions and personality. It's quite fun though, I promise ;)

Of course, I have a blog as well which you are reading now and thank you for that. If you haven't done so already, follow me on twitter( @diacre ) to find out about new blog posts as well as my opinions and personality ( which you may or may not find as colorful as Alec's ). Please let me know in the comments what you think of Alec's list class. If you have a different solution that you like I'd love to hear that as well. Until next time...au revoir.