Enhanced Interrogation

This is the hardest part of LA Noire, what really sets it apart: the interrogation system forces you to pay attention and use your head, instead of mindlessly navigating through linear story lines that have basically zero branching. Every interview branches out and affects the outcome, and for you to pass a case with the highest mark (they are rated with one to five stars) you would need to get every clue, hit every question right, etc.

Not a game for button mashers or for people that burn through full games in 10 hours. It IS very entertaining, but it will also give you a headache.

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On sleep deprivation and Incan Monkey Gods

From: Dilbert comic strip for 08/03/1992 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive. I was trying to show this strip to a coworker who is dangerously toying with the harsh mistress that is Insomnia. What shocked me is how quickly I was able to look up the strip, which was published when he was just 11 years old, and two weeks before my just-out-of-college ass shipped out to US Army Basic Training.

Add custom speed settings to your ifit map workout

Ifit.com allows you to build a workout walk/race/bike route simply by clicking on a Google Maps interface. You can then use a compatible ifit-enabled workout machine to recreate the route automatically. The problem is that the user interface still isn't final, so there are features in place that aren't exactly obvious. For example, if you create a workout your machine starts at 1 MPH, because that's the default. But how to set it to start at say, 3 MPH? Easy, just switch from map view to graph view: That button switches from the Google Maps interface to a chart that allows you to visualize and control effort: You can't change the elevation, this is fixed due to the geography that you selected. But you can drag the yellow (speed line) to change the speed of your device. What if you want to have segments at different speeds? Easy, just click and drag and it will break the line, and you can drag each segment of the line independently: ...

Software Entropy and the Strangler Fig: Surviving a 20-Year-Old Codebase

Right now, I find myself fighting a three-front war. Front one is keeping a 20-year-old behemoth of a B2B application alive. We are talking about decades of legacy ASP.NET and VB.NET where two decades of tweaks, patches, and "temporary fixes" have become permanent, load-bearing pillars of the architecture. Every time I touch it, it feels like playing Operation with oven mitts on—spending 90% of my week untangling logic just so a simple bug fix doesn’t cause a ripple effect that crashes a critical service. Front two is modernizing the architecture. I am actively trying to implement a rudimentary Strangler Fig pattern—slowly carving out legacy functionality and pushing it into a clean, testable shared library project so we can actually run proper unit tests and stop the bleeding. Front three is modernizing the team. While keeping the lights on and quietly rebuilding the engine, I am also pushing a retraining effort to get my peers up to current framework versions and embracing ...

The Insomniac Coder

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