A garage sale for your mind

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A collection of 180 posts

I Was Wrong

I was wrong. It happens. Turns out libxml2 has a push mechanism that does exactly what I wanted: feed the SAX parser data as it arrives instead of buffering. Wrap it in some Objective-C and now stories appear in my iPhone app as the XML downloads. Tada.

Message Parsing

Parsing a poorly documented binary protocol in my evening job, I hit a message that ended in a stray 0x00 that didn't fit the spec. As I drifted off to sleep it hit me: the two extra bytes I'd noticed last week. The real question: do I bill them for falling asleep on the problem?

Streaming SAX Parser

I need a SAX parser, fine, there are plenty. But I need a *streaming* one, able to take data as it arrives over a slow, high-latency network and update the UI before all the XML lands. And I can't find one. I guess I write my own? I thought this was standardized years ago.

Thinking Back

I'm sitting at my new job working on an iPhone app, happy to no longer be staring at the Bloomberg terminal. You'd guess that interface was a product of the 1970's and you'd be right, but you wouldn't think they'd still be foisting it on people 30-plus years later.

Wiring

I've tired of pure software, and a friend's Arduino opened a thousand doors. I settled on a Wiring board and made SparkFun my new favorite site. After much agonizing my first program runs: the LED blinks S-O-S. A humble beginning, with GPS, sensors, and a balloon project ahead.

Bases of Pi

Falling asleep, I wondered whether pi looks more interesting in other bases. So I took 50 digits, made a bignum, and looped from base 2 to 36. Base 32 spells undocs, base 31 says sack. Not that interesting. But is there such a thing as a fractional base?

BigMath-20080428-1

A BigMath release before I leave for Alaska: nth root support, string-to-bignum, and a half-finished calculator GUI. I also talked myself into, and then out of, distributing a single number's memory across multiple machines.

Is Java Dying?

I just want an RPC server for Java that doesn't drag in the over-grown train wreck that is J2EE. Even the Apache XML-RPC developers can't explain why people keep using their workaround of a WebServer instead. Actually, the reason seems obvious.

BigMath on the Free Software Directory

Turns out my BigMath project is listed on the Free Software Directory, where it ranks #2 on Google for BigMath. The #1 slot belongs to something called Big Math Attack!, which looks like Windows 95 math tutoring software. I hope this post doesn't help it.

I am in-vin-ci-ble!

I'm fairly sure I just became the first person ever to run LimeWire under Java SE6 on Mac OS X. SE6 is 64-bit only, Carbon is 32-bit only, and they do not play well together. Good enough for a victory dance.

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