The Morality of Star Trek – A Libertarian Perspective

The Morality of Star Trek – A Libertarian Perspective
   The reason why consuming art is a good way to learn history is that it gives even better window into the way a society thinks at certain point in time than studying history. I clearly remember when I was in 9th or 10th grade and we had to write an essay on Don Quixote. A girl in my class wrote a wonderful essay arguing that Cervantes never understood what he wrote. He died believing he wrote a fun story which mocked novels about knights. However, the spirit of the time often leaks into art even without the author realizing it. Don Quixote turned out to be full of renaissance ideals. Art also works its way around censorship a great example being Bulgarian movies from the communist era. The censors just did not think of censoring certain elements because they were just everyday life.

   Motivated by this I spent like a year falling asleep to an episode of Star Trek every night. I wanted to become familiar with the cultural icon and see how people thought back then. I watched The Original Series (TOS), The Animated Series and The Next Generation (TNG) as well as all the feature films. TOS is objectively bad and The Next Generation is probably good for the time but these days there are TV series of much greater quality. That being said the cultural impact of Star Trek makes it worth investigating. In this article I am going to comment on the libertarian issues in Star Trek...
Posted by:   Stilgar
18:07 24.03.2020

C# 8.0 Features - Part 1 - Default Interface Members

C# 8.0 Features - Part 1 - Default Interface Members
   The next major C# 8.0 feature I would like to comment on is the Default Interface Members. This feature is straight-forward. It simply allows you to define implementations for the methods, indexers and properties in the interface. Lets look at this example I made up that makes no actual sense...
Posted by:   Stilgar
01:10 04.11.2019

C# 8.0 Features - Part 0 - Nullabe Reference Types

C# 8.0 Features - Part 0 - Nullabe Reference Types
   As is the tradition of this no-blog when a new version of the C# programming language is released, I must inform my millions of readers of my correct opinion of the new feature set. It seems to me that C# 8.0 is the most impactful release of C# only rivaled by version 2 (and of course version 1.0 since it went from non-existing to existing with that version). I guess I will need to split this commentary in parts. This first part is about the gamechanger – non-nullable reference types...
Posted by:   Stilgar
00:42 15.10.2019

The State of .NET GUI Frameworks

The State of .NET GUI Frameworks
   GUI development in C# has fallen to the sidelines in recent years. The main reason is the rise of mobile platforms and the fact that traditional C# GUI tools focus on Windows. That being said in 2018 we see a resurgence in interest in .NET based GUI frameworks. The most interesting are in experimental stage but the sheer amount of interest and the reaction from the community makes me believe that at least one of them will make it to production-ready state and will see significant use in the industry. For completeness I will list older frameworks. Note that I only have experience with Win Forms, WPF and UWP so the information on the other frameworks may not be correct. In addition the experimental frameworks will probably see significant development in the coming months and some of them may even stop development so if you are from the future make sure you look for the current status of each project. BTW do we have flying cars yet? Did Web Assembly make it?
Last edited by:   Stilgar
on   13:24 20.08.2018
Posted by:   Stilgar
21:55 19.08.2018

Ten Years of No-blogging

   Ten years ago on this day I launched this personal website which is definitely not a blog. It was just a side project to learn LINQ and the new features of ASP.NET 3.5. Who would have thought it would last for 10 years? My noobier self was quite proud of what I had written and of course with time I became ashamed. Right now I'd rather rewrite the project than develop new functionality on top of the current codebase and no, that has nothing to do with it being Web Forms.

   I learned a lot of things from this project. Although after learning LINQ I did not meet any programming challenges it turns out a real-world project has a lot of requirements one normally does not think of. A favorite example is avoiding double post when the user has just posted a comment and presses F5. A real world project has a lot of small issues like this one that tend to be overlooked when learning. When I built this project I was already working as a professional programmer but I still had people to look after me and tell me about all the small things I had missed. Being forced to think of them myself taught me what managing a software project felt like. I fought spam and had to implement ways to block it quickly. I had to change the defaults of some features because they turned out to be terrible user experience for the main user - myself. In addition I implemented some "clever" solutions for simple things just to learn why they are not that clever and why big boys do it differently.

   Here are some stats:

   Total Posts: 268 (about 1 article every 2 weeks on average)
   Posts in Bulgarian: 127
   Posts in English: 141
   Posts about music: 71
   Posts about programming: 64
   Posts about games: 36
   Posts about technology: 41
   Comments: 1645
Posted by:   Stilgar
00:05 03.02.2018
First Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10  ... Next Last