Every time someone asks me which retro handheld gaming console to buy, I point them towards an Analogue Pocket, or the cheaper cartridge-based emulator the Evercade. But that story is far from complete: there is much more choice than I initially realized. Still, how to choose? Fear not—observe the following Decision Tree:
The decisions I’ve included are the following, from left to right:
€70
.€45
and a spare screen for €35
to solder it in yourself. The GBA still supports original GB and GBC games, although the resolution is very limited due to the widescreen layout. If you prefer 8-bit goodness, I’d buy and mod a GBC. Unless you have the money to get an Analogue Pocket, of course.€90
, you have the handheld with three carts!—but comes with a sub-par screen. Its cart library is rapidly expanding, but still only contains a bit more obscure games. Remember that this is still emulation, albeit in a properly licensed way. The battery life sucks though.€180
), but game development support is great. This is one of those new old retro devices. Let’s hope long-term support will be lasting.€105
, you can’t go wrong. Do remember that you’ll have to dip a toe in that shady looking gray area of “stumbling upon” ROM files, or have to dump them yourself with the help of GBxCart-related PCBs. You can slot in any Chinese or Raspberry Pi-based emulation solution in here.To follow the tree, answer the following questions:
€150
?
I purposely left out the recent Steam Deck since that’s anything but a retro machine. And to all Sega Game Gear or Neo Geo Pocket fans: sorry! Replace the modded GBA/GBC with your favorite nineties handheld. The Analogue Pocket supports Game Gear games through a converter at an additional cost. Also, there’s the Neo Geo Pocket Color Selection Vol.1 (among others) available for the Nintendo Switch, but it does run on emulation.
Happy handheld retro gaming!
By Wouter Groeneveld on 23 May 2022. Reply via email.
When it comes to teaching software engineering, I’ve been thinking “We’re doing it wrong” for a while now, and the recent ACM Tech talk “Lessons From the Fifty-Year Quest to Turn Programmers into Software Engineers” only confirmed my suspicion. Adam Barr, a seasoned software consultant that was involved in major Microsoft products for years, gave a surprisingly sobering talk by serving us quotes from fifty years ago. How about this one from E. Dijkstra in 1972 (emphasis by Barr):
It would be very nice if I could illustrate the various techniques with small demonstration programs and could conclude with “… and when faced with a program a thousand times as large, you compose it in the same way”. This common educational device, however, would be self-defeating as one of my central themes will be that any two things that differ in some respect by a factor of already a hundred or more, are utterly incomparable.
Guess how we still teach software engineering—and computing in general? Right, small demonstration programs! Here’s a function:
int add(int one, int two) {
return one + two
}
Write a unit test for it! Here’s one as an example:
TEST(AddTest, ShouldAddOneAndTo) {
EXPECT_EQ(add(1, 2), 5);
}
There, you now know how to unit-test stuff. What’s next? Right, design patterns. Here’s a factory—etc, etc. Of course, you have to start somewhere, and syntax and ecosystems are usually the first trip wires students struggle to overcome, so throwing them in the deep end by presenting a huge project with thousands of unit tests or all too pragmatically implemented design patterns will be of little help here.
So we start out small. The problem is, we usually also end small and never neatly string everything together across courses. No way, that would mean collaborating with another teacher, woah there. Academia can be a sad state of affairs sometimes, and although this is not always the case, it’s much more common than you think. It’s somehow surprisingly hard to present a uniform picture to the students from the teaching staff as one team instead of a collection of individuals with their own style and preference for tooling, that causes further confusion.
Within my own courses, I try to relate the small examples to the work field by digging into source code from bigger repositories available at GitHub. It’s both educational and a lot of fun to dabble in the Quake 3 or BoardGameGeek app source code, looking for examples of dependency injection and smart usage of factory classes (or, in the case of Quake’s C code, structs). What is strange, however, is that this problem is far from new, if we are to believe Adam Barr. Here’s another lovely quote, from Harlan Mills in 1980:
If precision and scope are not gained in university education, it is very difficult to acquire them later, no matter how well motivated or adept a person might be at individual, intuitive approaches to problem solving.
It’s a quote I completely disagree with. I learned almost all the ropes after university education: both precision and scope. But still, it proves that in the eighties they didn’t quite yet solve the quest to turn programmers into software engineers.
Barr explains that academia overly focuses on what he calls “individual problem solving”: small subsets of algorithmic problems, that have little to nothing to do with real-life software engineering problems. Another classic example would be teaching and proving complexities of various sorting algorithms. Sure, they have their use, but mastering those problems by hacking away individually has little to do with team-based software engineering.
I used to think that the difference between the titles “programmer” and “software engineer” is just a matter of vanity, but in Barr’s context, a programmer will struggle to pick up the role of a software engineer, and in university, we’re teaching students to become programmers, while we actually need software engineers. Stop focusing on performance and algorithms. Focus on readability and code. The same is true for research, according to Barr: where is all the empiric software engineering research1 that focuses on how writing code in practice works? Instead, we’re publishing heaps and heaps of… individual program analysis results?
Isn’t it telling that in the seventies, both academics and industry experts like Dijkstra and Mills warned us that this ain’t the way to teach computing? Fifty years later, the situation apparently hasn’t changed much. This isn’t just according to Barr, or according to my personal experience with teaching, but also according to the research I’ve encountered and conducted myself by analyzing learning outcomes of computing-related course material across European universities.
There is no single explanation for this, but I feel that we aren’t really trying hard enough to solve it. Instead, we’re just minding our own business and securing our position by upping the P score through publishing stuff (anything goes!). I’ve been known to criticize how academia works before, and although I have little influence and am often wrong, I have the feeling the critical mass is way too small to radically innovate in that world.
Adam Barr warns academics that code bootcamps might take over—and perhaps rightly so. A few other observations that might contribute to the issue:
Barr ended his talk with a few recommendations: let students taste real-world code by exploring open source projects, give them bigger open assignments, etc. These conclusions can be read in pretty much every single paper on computing education, and as good as this practical advice is, I wonder why it’s almost never taken to heart. Even if it is, will it be enough? I wonder whether other universities might be more progressive than the ones I have experience with.
All things considered, in my opinion, the future is looking bleak. I’m still convinced students only really start learning as soon as they graduate and start working (and by “work”, I mean in industry, not staying around and doing a PhD!). Hopefully they end up in a company that cares about life-long learning, assigns them an amicable coach, and employs pair programming to quickly bring their knowledge above the minimum level. The more I think about this, the less I think academia—at least in its current state—will be able to rectify this.
And without a critical mass, there’s little I can do besides getting even more frustrated.
I’m not saying there isn’t anything like that: there’s among others the ICSE (International Conference on Software Engineering), where I also published. However, consider this: at our university, KU Leuven, one of the oldest and internationally well-respected Belgian universities with a huge computer science department, there isn’t a single research group with primary focus on software engineering. Some, like DISTRINET, say they research “software engineering”, but judging from their publications, it’s not the SE Adam Barr and I are talking about. Compare this to University of Stuttgart’s Empirical Software Engineering group, where exciting and genuinely interesting things on the subject are being put out. That proves it’s not impossible to get funded. ↩︎
By Wouter Groeneveld on 18 May 2022. Reply via email.
May 2020 was unusually hot. According to European service Copernicus, May 2020 was the hottest since the beginning of the measurements. But May 2022 is also unusually hot—and very dry. In Belgium, so far, there has been 1 mm
of rain, that would be the second driest month since 1983, where only 37.6 mm
of rain was measured during the whole spring period. This persistent period of drought regularly appears in the local news:
Het neerslagtekort in Vlaanderen is op dit moment al groter dan dat van de extreem droge zomers van 1976, 2018 en 2020. Dat blijkt uit cijfers van professor waterkunde Patrick Willems (KU Leuven).
(The precipitation deficit in Flanders is on this moment already bigger than that of extreme dry summers of 1976, 2018, and 2020. This is evident from numbers of hydrology professor Patrick Willems (KU Leuven)).
The article then proceeds to deal out very practical tips such as “do not leave the tap running” (really?) and “place a rain barrel in your garden”. Aha, we’ll get back to that.
I care about the weather, not only to have something to say when greeting neighbors during a walk with the dog, but also because I want my lettuce, courgette (I’m sorry Americans, sure, summer squash, whatever), and beets to grow. We only have a humble vegetable garden, and every single year I’m too late to the party or forget to sow, but it’s still something I deeply enjoy. Rooting in the earth takes me back to earth and keeps me away from a keyboard. Sometimes the chickens are permitted to help.
These thirsty plants thrive with the right combination of sun, compost, and water. The latter is becoming a problem. My father has a huge greenhouse that is served by a combination of a groundwater well plus catching plenty of rainwater, while we only have a meager 220 l
water barrel connected to the drains of our garage. If I’m being very frugal, the garden requires at least four refills of a 5 l
watering can. That means within ten days, our barrel is empty.
The alternative is tap water, which is getting very expensive too, next to the ridiculous natural gas prices. The unit price of a cubic meter of water was €1.9652
1 in March (excluding various fixed costs), which would be €0.039
for 20 l
of vegetable joy. Even though that doesn’t sound like much, I’m being very conservative on the calculations, and I’d rather “catch it falling” instead.
How much rainwater can we catch, though? There are handy tools for this (in Dutch) that, depending on your location (Limburg: average rainfall of 62.5 mm
per month), the size of the garage roof (60 m²
, just a wild guess) and type of roof (tiles, flat, …) gives an estimate on how much rain you can collect in a year: 40 m³
or 181
times the 220 l
water barrel. That sounds like a lot of room for improvement! The calculator suggests to install a water tank of 3 m³
, while we have one of 0.22
. Ouch.
Except that the Belgian KMI institute measures on average 46.7 mm
total rainfall each month instead of the above 62, and it’s likely going to drop even further. Also, DuckDuckGo’s image search result for “water barrel” is much more modest, like the one we have in the photo above, compared to a “water tank"—a huge container we first have to figure out where on earth to put! Likely, indeed, on earth, preferably our own personal piece of earth. I’ll ask the chickens to move. Again.
I’m not quite sure where I’m going with these numbers, except that I need to remind myself to attach the second barrel we have lying around for a while now.
There’s an upside to the persistent drought: no pesky snails that make the tiny plants disappear.
Addendum, 17th May: Michael Hamann suggested to use a mulch method which involves a layer of hay to drastically reduce the need to water the vegetable garden. This is supposedly called the Ruth Stout method. Interesting, thanks Michael!
Peter Rukavina emailed me to tell the unit price on Canada’s Prince Edward Island is €0.29
! While our price doesn’t even include a contribution for the drainage of dirty water—another €1.40
. And we still have to buy still water to make our tea because of all the chlorine. ↩︎
By Wouter Groeneveld on 16 May 2022. Reply via email.