Back when I started writing for this site, I wrote an article called “Don’t Write Tutorials” in which I discussed the dangers inherent in the glut of hastily-written, poorly-explained “tutorials” that can be found all over the internet. I also wrote a companion article, “Don’t Read Source Code,” wherein I tried to explain the difficulties that can stem from using code (and only code) as a learning resource.

Unfortunately I lost both of those articles in a server move, because I was careless in my backup process. Thanks to archive.org, I can pull up the originals, but rather than simply repost them verbatim I thought I would take the opportunity to re-edit and unify my thoughts on the matter. →

Tinto is one of Jose Garces’ restaurants in Philadelphia. Garces’ second restaurant in the city, Tinto is based around the cuisine of the mountainous Basque region that forms a border between France and Spain. The decor evokes a wine-cellar: exposed brick, walls of wine bottles in little cubbies, and heavy, rough-hewn wooden tables. I love the style, but I found the space to be a little too dark, overall.

I was in town for the Thanksgiving holiday, and wanted to take my parents out to try the place. We ordered the tasting menu, in order to maximize our exposure to the restaurant’s fare. →

October 17-28 was Seattle Restaurant Week 2010, and as is my wont I went to several restaurants to try out their food. Unfortunately I was fairly lax in keeping track of the details of the dishes, so that’s why some of the descriptions are fairly brief. →

Every now and then I come across a Visual Studio solution file that won’t open, because the Visual Studio Version Selector can’t figure out what to do with the file — even if the version specification in the header of the file is present. This usually happens with solutions that look like they were machine-generated. In fact, I had it happen to all the solutions SlimBuild produced when I first started building support for that operation.

So far, the problem I’ve seen with all the broken files is the lack of a UTF8 byte order mark at the beginning of the file. You can fix the problem by opening and saving the file with an appropriately powerful text editor, or by manually opening the file from the correct version of Visual Studio, causing a change to the solution (such as renaming a configuration), and hitting “Save All.”

Derek Yu wrote about finishing games yesterday; in particular, he provided some tips for making sure you actually get that damn game done (tip #3 echoes — to an extent — my own thoughts about writing game engines). →