For the last 5 years or so, I’ve stopped writing on technical subjects on this blog. But that doesn’t mean I stop writing completely, in fact, I keep on writing a lot, but keep them to myself instead of posting out. For reasons too numerous to tell, or to be short, just because… I’m lazy… Software engineering is a still a relatively – young industry, hence… naivety, untruthfulnesses, deceptions, myths, lies, and dogmas are… countless. In that environment, writings could be controversial and misleading, so I choose to note down my ideas in private.
started with Turbo-C on DOS, then move on to different dialects of the C language: Watcom C, Borland C++, C++, glibC, Obj-C… For me, the most important thing in programming is… crashes. It crashes right away to tell you that you’ve done something wrong! It crashes when you access a null pointer, it crashes when you use an API the wrong way, it crashes when you allocate an infeasible amount of memory, it crashes when you access a dangling pointer referencing to an object which has gone out of scope, just because you can’t keep a right tracking on the life-cycle of that object. It doesn’t even throw an exception and try going on until the situation is unmanageable. Simply put, there’s NO exception, you’re punished immediately, as soon as you’ve done something wrong!
I strongly advocate the use of ARC for memory management, in fact, I would call it the most brilliant feature of the Obj-C language for the last 25 years or so, ARC makes life much more easier. But I also advocate the use of crashes as a “graceful” way to tell that you’ve done something wrong with the deallocated blocks. It crashes right away when you allocate an unbearable amount of memory so that you would know that your algorithms and data – structures are not efficient enough, and you will need to improve, to do tuning, optimization! For me, modern languages are good and friendly, the down side is that it’s also too friendly to the developers, without punishments, how can the devs’ skills could be improved!
Thus, by the interacting between you – the coder and the computer & compiler combination, the reward – punishment model will help greatly boost the devs’ skills over time, and help producing good code. There’re huge differences between an experienced programmer who write good code, and foresee possibilities of bugs, and a novice one who only try to make it… just run. I really want to emphasize here, that the “reward – punishment” model of programming is what made a good programmer! Also by learning to handle memory problems by yourself give you opportunities to follow and understand the life cycles of objects, of memory blocks, understand the precise flows of code, understand the cost-and-benefits of each coding approaches.
To summarize about languages, C is like Sanskrit, extremely precise and accurate, rigid grammar, strong types, all syntaxes has profound implications. High level languages such as Swift, .NET, JavaScript, etc are like… Vietnamese, lacking a good grammar, and quite vague and inconsistent in meanings. Of course, learning C is hard, not everyone want to do things the hard way. On the other hand, it’s too easy to quickly draft up some simple apps in high-level languages, which would naturally give a fallacy that devs are good, whatever they write, it seems to run “smoothly and perfectly”! Of course, high-level languages have their roles, for examples, to make some prototyping… until things get huge and complex!
hẳng bao giờ muốn nói về software engineering, vì với tôi, đó là việc làm hàng ngày, đã làm hàng ngày thì có gì nhiều để mà nói!? Để ý thấy thường ai đó nói thật nhiều về điều gì (tiền bạc, tình yêu, trí thức, đạo đức…) thì tức là người ta thiếu cái đó! Tôi thì chỉ muốn nói nhiều về nhạc, vì âm nhạc với tôi là chưa bao giờ đủ! Tuy vậy hôm nay ngứa miệng nói về software engineering chút, gần đây đọc được 
gày nào, cho tôi biết, biết yêu em rồi, tôi biết tương tư, sau đây là câu chuyện tình tôi tự kể, 
hi còn nhỏ, tôi có một “biệt tài” là… mài dao rất sắc 😀. Một công việc tưởng chẳng khó khăn gì nhưng thực ra cũng không đơn giản lắm, muốn mài dao cho sắc và độ sắc ấy giữ được lâu cũng có khá nhiều kỹ thuật mà tôi chỉ tìm ra được sau nhiều tuần thử nghiệm. Chẳng là trong nhà họ hàng tôi lúc ấy làm cau khô: mua cau tươi về gọt vỏ, cắt miếng và sấy khô đem bán. Người ta chẳng bảo sắc như dao cau là gì, và ai đã làm công việc đó sẽ hiểu một con dao sắc là như thế nào.
his is just a post of my truly nonsense and random thought. Some notions are just interesting in their own forms, like writing on the margins or 
aving written myself numerous UI widgets, from simple to complex, from Windows to Linux, from 2D to 3D… but I’ve just started writing iOS widgets not too long ago. Making iOS widgets is really fun, for we have supports from the most powerful 2D graphics system ever built, that is CoreGraphics (Quartz 2D). 
uch an interesting device I’ve used recently, a stylus for iPad. While stylus like Wacom’s Bamboo is fine for general sketching, it’s not really suitable for fine – grained drawing. This Byzero takes a different approach as it does not use iPad’s touches, but provides its own mechanism. Image on the left: you can see that the pen is actually an ultra sound source, two microphones (and an infrared receiver) in a single piece plugged into the iPad connector port. Pen position detection is done by 
ột ví dụ kinh điển trong làng Tân nhạc để minh họa cho cái tư duy hình thức sơ đẳng và thô thiển phổ biến với người Việt. Cách đây đã lâu, một nhạc sĩ rất có tiếng và có tài sau một thời gian du học ở Liên Xô về đã nói: 
