Viewing profile — mrbrandonking

Look at the picture: American pool table in the foreground, pocketless carom billiards table in the background. My aim was to explain the author’s terminology for those who’ve neve…

“... Michelson would run ten or twelve billiards with a touch so delicate that the three balls could always be covered by a hat.” Michelson was playing billiards on a table without…

Whenever the author refers to “billiards,” he’s talking about a game played on a pocketless table with three balls. He says “Pool” whenever he’s referring to pocket billiards, the …

The best introduction to TDD that I've seen is Jon Reid's video tutorial here... http://qualitycoding.org/objective-c-tdd/ Even though he's demonstrating TDD with Objective-C, I've…

ReSharper is an add-on component for Visual Studio that is (IMO) the best refactoring tool available for any IDE. ReSharper includes an NUnit-based test runner, too. JetBrains is t…

Your second point about American TV networks and pool is also true. Commentary is usually provided by some vacuous talking head who's never played pool before, gets excited about s…

Good observation. I wondered the same thing when someone else commented that most people are uninterested in watching pool on TV. Yet snooker is a big hit on TV in the UK, as you p…

I think "What societal change explains this?" is a very HN-worthy topic. In fact, that was my first guess as to why a straight pool article was submitted to HN. But the straight po…

Sang Lee (Korean-American 3-cushion legend) opened a world-class billiards facility in Flushing, NY, called Carom Cafe. Heated billiard tables, the works. Sang Lee has since passed…

You're right, it was Irving Crane who won that match. Good catch! I got mixed-up because Joe Balsis also had some famous 150-and-out runs - including one against Crane in their ver…

I'm glad you enjoyed the video. I'll go ahead and throw these out there, too, so everybody can see comparable "masterpieces" in other billiard games... Ronnie O'Sullivan with a 147…

It seems like straight pool provided a more accurate means of distinguishing skill levels between players. Dallas West (straight pool pro from 70's) once said that he knew he had a…

Snooker balls are smaller than regular pool balls. There's also a difference between snooker equipment manufacturer in the U.S. and what's used in the United Kingdom and the rest o…

Simple answer: Declining attention spans. For those who've never seen straight pool (AKA 14.1) played, here's a link to video of an all-time classic match: Joe Balsis running 150-a…

There's a start-up scene starting to grow around Northwest Arkansas somewhat. Innovate Arkansas and the ARK Challenge are a local source of seed funding. NWA TechFest http://nwatec…

The Tulsa TechFest is in your hometown - http://techfests.com/Tulsa/2014/default.aspx . It was actually the first of the TechFests, and draws over 1,000 people. I've attended both …

There's a story on "The Daily WTF" that's almost certainly about Epic Systems. Epic apparently uses an obfuscated 60's-era language called MUMPS. See http://thedailywtf.com/Article…

I'm leasing a server from MacStadium that's used for iOS continuous integration. I could also see MacStadium being useful for someone learning iOS development who isn't ready to sp…

Check out Ray Wenderlich's iOS tutorials at http://www.raywenderlich.com/store/ios-5-by-tutorials .

I was expecting something about the Cocoa Touch UIKit.

You're absolutely right. "Simple to use, simple to build" is another thought in people’s minds. They don't realize it's actually harder to build something that's simple to use.