Simon Says : Tag archive for 'code'

How to interview well at Google

Posted on August 29, 2011 at 10:11 PM

Categories: tech, code, infographics, jobs

Some friends of mine have been interviewing at Google and I've been helping them prepare. After some practice interviews, I drew up this flowchart for them to take with them (mentally) to the interviews.

Google uses "oral exam" type interviews:

The best preparation guide is by Steve Yegge.
You can pretty much ignore all the official guides that Google provides.
Expect tough questions of the type that you would have received in your advanced CS classes.
You can also mine programming contests for good questions.
Another good source of questions is this mathNews question list.

For another strategy, pull out your copy of CLR(S) (you do have a copy, right?) and re-learn everything. It's all fair game in a google interview.

After you start reviewing, you must do practice interviews. Invite a friend over to ask you questions. Here is what they have to do:

Pick a challenging question and read it to you.
Not give you any help at all.
Ask for a solution in pseudo-code. When you provide it, ask for the order of magnitude runtime analysis.
If you make a mistake, after a while, they should say "are you sure that's correct?"
If you don't give the optimal solution, they should let you develop it, and when you're done, say "do you think there's a better way to do it?"

Believe it or not, interviewing someone isn't a fun as you think, so provide them with beer and/or pizza. Meanwhile you must do your work on a whiteboard. If you don't have one, use a flip-chart or as a last resort paper.

Trust me, answering questions in real time on a white board isn't like doing them in your head. You must practice this or you're going to mess up the interview. Practice with a friend!

Finally, use the interview flowchart to answer the questions:

The first, simplest solution just has to work. Don't worry about runtime at this point.
Start with pseudocode. Only real code if they ask for it.
Do a bunch of examples. Make up some sample data and run through it by hand. This will help you understand the problem better, even if you think you already do.
Once you complete a simple (slow) solution, prove it works and then move on to making it faster.

If you do well, the interviewer will tell you you're done before you run out of time. Good luck!

How to embed a 480p YouTube video

Posted on April 19, 2011 at 10:17 PM

Categories: code, internet

Google doesn't provide any "official" way to embed a YouTube video in 480p. It always drops you down to 360p by default, and that just looks crap. You can embed in HD so why not 480p? No one knows. But don't despair, there is a way!

Here's some code for you:

<object width="853" height="505">
  <param value="http://www.youtube.com/v/MOVIE_ID&amp;amp;hl=en_US&amp;amp;fs=1&amp;amp;rel=0" name="movie">
  <param value="true" name="allowFullScreen">
  <param value="always" name="allowscriptaccess">
  <embed width="853" height="505" allowfullscreen="true"
    allowscriptaccess="always"
    type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
    src="http://www.youtube.com/v/MOVIE_ID&amp;amp;hl=en_US&amp;amp;fs=1&amp;amp;rel=0"&gt;
</object>

That will give you an "HD width" 480p video. Just change "MOVIE_ID" to the ID of your video (e.g. "J-lHxxToCfo") in both places. The width of the embed will be 853px, which is 16:9 for HD video.

What if your video is 4:3, i.e. 640x480? I can't find any clean way to embed at exactly that size, if you use the above code you'll get black bars on either side. However you can use a negative margin to get a box of the right shape. Just wrap your object like this:

<div style="width: 640px; overflow: hidden;">
  <div style="margin-left: -107px;">
    <object etc ... ></object>
  </div>
</div>

The controls will go off the screen but at least the user will still be able to click the centre of the video to start and stop it. Here's an example:

My column width is less than 640px but hopefully you get the idea.

Another job opening :-) iPhone developer — learn on the job

Posted on May 04, 2010 at 04:32 PM

Categories: code, business, iphone, jobs

My iPhone custom software development business is expanding yet again and we need more part-time programmers. The last round I hired two people, now we need more. Our recent apps include Unitron's uHear to test your hearing, OurKids, the Kik chat app, and others.

You must:

know C, C++, pointers, object and object-relational patterns already
be ready to learn the iPhone SDK fast (we'll help)

I've personally been programming on the Cocoa SDK since 1998 back when it was called OpenStep, so if you can pick things up, we can get you up to speed in a few weeks.

Demonstrate your qualifications by answering 2 out of these 3 tricky questions:

[Question 1] (C Pointers) Here is some slightly odd C code, but it will produce an (int) result, provided that you make some small changes in order to make it compile. What is the result going to be, and why?

int * a = 1990;
int result = &5[a];

[Question 2] (Database design) Create an entity-relationship diagram for a small subset of the Facebook database. In particular, include in your diagram:

User
Photo (including who is tagged in the photo)
Wall Post

Focus on the relationships/associations between these three objects, and only include one or two of the most important static fields (like a person's name). Make sure to indicate the cardinality of a relationship e.g. one-to-one/one-to-many/etc.

To get an idea of what I'm looking for see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-relationship_model

Here's a tool you can use to draw it online: Gliffy. Then just send me a screenshot. Or feel free to use ASCII art or draw on a piece of paper and photograph/scan, as long as it's very clear.

[Question 3] (C++ Objects) The C++ program below has just 2 compile time errors, 1 runtime error, and there is 1 single line missing. Send us a fixed version that compiles and runs correctly. The errors will test your knowledge of object use and management in C++, and the missing line will test you on abstract/virtual inheritance.

SEND TO: simon@semacode.com. Include your answer(s) and some source code that you have written, whether it's open source, for assignments, for fun, or whatever.

REMUNERATION: Competitive.

MORE INFO: http://simonwoodside.com/pages/consulting

(PS Please keep the answers to yourself)

//// File: futurama.cpp ////
#include <iostream>

class Drinker {
public: Drinker(); void drink( int potency ); int _numberOfDrinksSoFar;
private: virtual int cantDrinkAnyMoreThan() = 0;
}; Drinker::Drinker() { _numberOfDrinksSoFar = 0; }
class Robot : public Drinker { int cantDrinkAnyMoreThan() { return INT_MAX; } };
class Human : public Drinker {
};
void Drinker::drink( int potency ) {
  _numberOfDrinksSoFar += potency;
  if( _numberOfDrinksSoFar > cantDrinkAnyMoreThan() ) { std::cout << "I'm all done." << endl; }
}

int main (int argc, char * const argv[]) {
  int beer = 5, coffee = 3;
  Human fry;
  Robot * bender;
  for( int i=0; i<6283; i++ ) { bender.drink(beer); }
  for( int i=0; i<100; i++ ) { fry.drink(coffee); }
  std::cout << "Bender: " << bender->_numberOfDrinksSoFar << "  Fry: " << fry._numberOfDrinksSoFar << std::endl;
  fry.drink(1);
  return 0;
}

Bug Points

Posted on March 27, 2010 at 03:34 AM

Categories: code

An incomplete list.

Per:

line of code: 1 point
line of generated code: 5 points
repeated line of code: 50 points
repeated comment: 10 points
TODO note: -10 points
comment explaining hack: -10 points
hack: 50 points
clever hack: -50 points
memory leak: 10 points
ignored warning: 100-1000 points
public but should be private: 100 points
unreadable line of code: 50 points
whitespace at the end of a line of code: 15 points
a tab: 25 points
incorrect indentation: 5 points

Compare: technical debt.

Job Opening: iPhone part-time / contract coder wanted -- we'll teach you

Posted on February 11, 2010 at 03:07 AM

Categories: code, business, iphone, jobs

My iPhone custom software development business is expanding and we need more part-time programmers. Our recent apps include Unitron's uHear to test your hearing, OurKids, an upcoming app for Kik, and others.

You must:

know C, C++, pointers, object and object-relational patterns already
be ready to learn the iPhone SDK fast (we'll help)

I've personally been programming on the Cocoa SDK since 1998 back when it was called OpenStep, so if you can pick things up, we can get you up to speed in a few weeks.

Demonstrate your qualifications by answering 2 out of these 3 tricky questions:

[Question 1] (C Pointers) Here is some slightly odd C code, but it will produce an (int) result, provided that you make some small changes in order to make it compile. What is the result going to be, and why?

int * a = 1990;
int result = &5[a];

[Question 2] (ORM) Draw an relational/DB model that would work for the Twitter database or the Facebook database. You don't have to cover all of the features, just the basics. You can use ascii art if you like.

[Question 3] (C++ Objects) The C++ program below has just 2 compile time errors, 1 runtime error, and there is 1 single line missing. Send us a fixed version that compiles and runs correctly. The errors will test your knowledge of object use and management in C++, and the missing line will test you on abstract/virtual inheritance.

SEND TO: simon@semacode.com. Include your answer(s) and some source code that you have written, whether it's open source, for assignments, for fun, or whatever.

REMUNERATION: Competitive.

MORE INFO: http://simonwoodside.com/pages/consulting

(PS Please keep the answers to yourself)

//// File: futurama.cpp ////
#include <iostream>

class Drinker {
public: Drinker(); void drink( int potency ); int _numberOfDrinksSoFar;
private: virtual int cantDrinkAnyMoreThan() = 0;
}; Drinker::Drinker() { _numberOfDrinksSoFar = 0; }
class Robot : public Drinker { int cantDrinkAnyMoreThan() { return INT_MAX; } };
class Human : public Drinker {
};
void Drinker::drink( int potency ) {
  _numberOfDrinksSoFar += potency;
  if( _numberOfDrinksSoFar > cantDrinkAnyMoreThan() ) { std::cout << "I'm all done." << endl; }
}

int main (int argc, char * const argv[]) {
  int beer = 5, coffee = 3;
  Human fry;
  Robot * bender;
  for( int i=0; i<6283; i++ ) { bender.drink(beer); }
  for( int i=0; i<100; i++ ) { fry.drink(coffee); }
  std::cout << "Bender: " << bender->_numberOfDrinksSoFar << "  Fry: " << fry._numberOfDrinksSoFar << std::endl;
  fry.drink(1);
  return 0;
}

(Update Feb 14: updated code to make my intentions clearer)

How to prepare a build for distribution in the App Store using the Program Portal, XCode, and iTunes Connect

Posted on September 28, 2009 at 04:59 PM

Categories: code, iphone

Apple does a pretty good job of explaining how to prepare the meta-data for an app submission in iTunes Connect, but it's not completely obvious how to prepare your actual build in XCode.

Assuming that you've already got Ad Hoc distribution working, it's not too hard. I was looking for advice and didn't find it, but I did find a question on StackOverflow that people had actually downrated and not really answered. So I figured out how to do it and added a proper answer. So without further adieu, rate me up on StackOverflow to give me wonderful wonderful karma, and view,

How to prepare a build for distribution in the App Store using the Program Portal, XCode, and iTunes Connect on StackOverflow

What happens when you don't understand open source licenses?

Posted on September 17, 2009 at 12:20 AM

Categories: tech, code, opensource

I was just checking out a TextMate-like editor for Windows called E Text Editor. It looks pretty good, but I was a bit surprised when I read about his "Open Company License".

To be clear, this is something he came up with himself, and it's not a bad idea. To be double clear, it's NOT open source. And he says that up front. He added "just one" clause to the standard BSD license:

Any redistribution, in whole or in part, must retain full licensing functionality, without any attempt to change, obscure or in other ways circumvent its intent.

Not bad. Users gain because they can modify the software and use the modified version all they want for in house purposes, and they don't have to share those changes with anyone. But they still have to pay him, and that's why it's not open source.

Unfortunately for him, he made a little mistake, because the clause only stipulates on redistribution.

So if you want E Text Editor for free, just download the source, modify it to remove the licensing code, build and use it. As long as you use it only yourself, you're perfectly legit and don't have to pay.

In addition, he left open a rather major hole. Anyone can now make a completely separate small program which downloads the source code, automatically applies a patch which removes the licensing code, builds it and installs on the local computer. This is the way in which many applications include GPL software into non-free, just in reverse. To be clear, my hypothetical program does this:

You download my program, FreeE and run it on your computer.
FreeE goes online and grabs the source code for E Text Editor.
FreeE applies a patch to remove the code that makes you pay.
FreeE builds—on your local machine—a new copy of E Text Editor without the pay code.
FreeE quits and you delete it.

As long as you never distribute your copy of E Text Editor that you get this way, you're totally clear and legally able to use it without paying.

Alexander Stigsen, the author of E, might want to consider changing his license. But even if he does so, the versions he released under the current license will always have this hole. So go ahead, get some free as-in-beer software :-)

Regarding growing up your acts_as_taggable and lack of primary_key

Posted on August 12, 2009 at 07:53 PM

Categories: code, rails

This is a comment on "growing up your acts_as_taggable" post on Evan Weaver's blog snax.... because comments there are closed.

If you are upgrading from an older acts_as_taggable installation and moving to has_many_polymorphs, as I did, your old table will have create_table :id => false. That will be unhappy. You should add this to your migration:

add_column :taggings, :id, :primary_key

And that's all.

Closures with return values in Java

Posted on July 07, 2009 at 12:29 AM

Categories: code, java

Here's how to get everything you need from closures today in Java, without waiting for the big foreheads to argue over how to make it nice and perfect.

You've almost certainly used something sort of closure-like when you've used the Runnable interface. You can for example create an anonymous subclass of Runnable and .run() it:

  Runnable closure = new Runnable() {
    void run() { System.out.println("Hello"); }};
  closure.run(); // prints Hello

In particular in Java Thread class implements Runnable. You can do more interesting things, for example:

  StringBuffer _myString = new StringBuffer("Hello");
  // Java will only close around final variables because it's dumb
  final StringBuffer foo = _myString;
  Runnable closure = new Runnable() {
    public void run() { System.out.println(foo); }
  };
  closure.run(); // prints Hello

This is why it's called a closure—the anonymous subclass Closes Around the variables in the scope in which it's defined. So, it has access here to myString. If you change _myString in the original context the closure will use the new value.

You can pass closures around, for example pass it to another method in another class, and it will still remain closed around the Original context. Like this:

  public void anotherContext( Runnable closure ) {
    StringBuffer foo = new StringBuffer("Goodbye");
    closure.run(); // still prints Hello from its own context
  }

This is all available out of the box in Java, a little boring. It would be interesting if the closure could work on variables BOTH from its original context and that you pass into it at the same time. This can be done, but Runnable doesn't allow it, so we'll make our own Runnable:

// A general-purpose closure class that can receive and
//   return values when you call it.
// This is an abstract class... override these functions for
//   whatever kind of closure you need.
// If you call a non-overriden function, it will throw you.
public class SemaRunnable {
  public void run() { throw new RuntimeException("Must override SemaRunnable.run()"); }
  public Object run( Object param ) { throw new RuntimeException("Must override SemaRunnable.run()"); }
}

Now I can do a simple example (from the Wikipedia article):

SemaRunnable bestSellingBooks = new SemaRunnable() {
  public Object run( Object thresholdObject ) {
    int threshold = ((Integer)thresholdObject).intvalue();
    // assume bookList is in the local context:
    myBookList = bookList.booksWithSalesGreaterThan(threshold);
    return myBookList;
  }
};
// call books = bestSellingBooks.run( Integer(5000) );

Here's a more complete example. In some code I'm working on, I need to pass an image—not just an image, but also the ability to get just a subImage of that image. I don't want them to have to know how to do image manipulation. Here is how I do it using closures:

    SemaRunnable getSubImage = new SemaRunnable() {
      public Object run( Object param ) {
        int x = Array.getInt(param,0); // these four variables
        int y = Array.getInt(param,1); // are coming in
        int width = Array.getInt(param,2); // from the
        int height = Array.getInt(param,3); // caller
        // Now I will close on a method in my local context:
        short[] subImg = dataForSubImage( x, y, width, height );
        return subImg;
      }
    };
    someObject.setClosureToBe(getSubImage);

...

  // This method is being closed upon in the local context:
  public short[] dataForSubImage( int x, int y, int width, int height ) {
    ...

someObject in some completely different part of my code, gets the closure and calls it like this:

  // completely different class, which received closure object
  int [] subImageData = (int[])closure.run( new int [] {new_x, new_y, new_w, new_h} );

You don't have to call it closure. And you can pass as many params either way as you like, storing them in arrays, since array is an Object in java.

But... but... but..., people will say, why not create a class which does this, and import the class, and construct the class, and make calls on the class, it would do the same thing. They just answered their own question: it requires lots of LOCs.

And there's other good reasons. For example, let's say you have two versions of your function for different situations, you can simply swap them out of they are closures. The beauty of it is, the java compiler doesn't know or care what's happening, because everything is just SemaRunnable and Object. So it's not going to complain that a function or class name has changed. That means metaprogramming goodness. Sweet.

So, practical closures in Java. It may look a little unfamiliar at first, but once you know how to do it it's easy and can be really useful.

EXTRA SPECIAL BONUS: An implementation of the full monty, closure that takes a closure, makes a new closure from it, and returns that. I promised myself I'd go to bed early, but instead I stayed up and wrote you this code which is guaranteed to actually work, because I tried it. Try running it.


// By: Simon Woodside sbwoodside (a)(t) gmail (d)o(t) com
// See: http://simonwoodside.com/weblog/2009/7/7/a_little_bit_more_serious/

// To try this out:
// % javac Test.java && java Test

// Demonstration of how to do closures in Java
// In this case, |derivative| is a closure which approximates derivatives, and
// |sineDerivativeApproximator| approximates the derivative of ... you guessed it ... sine.

// It's hard to believe, given how much code there is, but in javascript this would be:
// function derivative(f, dx) {
//   return function(x) {
//     return (f(x + dx) - f(x)) / dx;
//   };
// }
// (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_science) )

import java.util.*;
import java.lang.reflect.*;
import java.lang.*;

public class Test {
  public static void main (String args[]) {
    System.out.println("Closures coming up!");
    Test test = new Test();
    test.go();
  }
    
  // SemaRunnable is a general-purpose closure class that can receive and
  //   return values when you call it.
  // This is an abstract class... override these functions for
  //   whatever kind of closure you need.
  // If you call a non-overriden function, it will throw you.
  public class SemaRunnable {
    public void run() { throw new RuntimeException("Must override SemaRunnable.run()"); }
    public Object run( Object param ) { throw new RuntimeException("Must override SemaRunnable.run()"); }
  }
  
  void go() {
    // Let's start with a really simple example.
    // See my blog post for more details:
    StringBuffer _myString = new StringBuffer("Hello");
    final StringBuffer foo = _myString;
    Runnable closure = new Runnable() {
      public void run() { System.out.println(foo); }
    };
    closure.run(); // prints Hello
    
    // Now let's do something more fun.
    // A closure that receives a closure and returns a new closure.
    // This is going to be wordy because Java Arrays and Number objects are TERRIBLE
    
    // Return a function that approximates the derivative of f
    // using an interval of dx, which should be appropriately small.
    SemaRunnable derivative = new SemaRunnable() {
      public Object run( Object params ) {
        // params must be { SemaRunnable f, Float dx }
        final SemaRunnable f = (SemaRunnable)Array.get(params,0); // get f
        final float dx = ((Float)((Object[])params)[1]).floatValue(); // get dx
        SemaRunnable approximator = new SemaRunnable() {
          public Object run( Object xFloat ) {
            float x = ((Float)xFloat).floatValue();
            float fOfXPlusDx = ((Float)f.run( new Float(x + dx) )).floatValue();
            float fOfX = ((Float)f.run( new Float(x) )).floatValue();
            float answer = (fOfXPlusDx - fOfX) / dx;
            return new Float(answer);
          }
        };
        return approximator;
      }
    };
    // Now create a closure that will simply return the sine(x):
    SemaRunnable sineClosure = new SemaRunnable() {
      public Object run( Object xFloat ) {
        double sine = Math.sin( ((Float)xFloat).floatValue() );
        return new Float(sine);
      }
    };
    // And finally put it all together:
    SemaRunnable sineDerivativeApproximator =
      (SemaRunnable)derivative.run( new Object [] { sineClosure, new Float(0.001) } );
    for( double x = 0.0; x<3.1416; x+=0.1 ) {
      Float result = (Float)sineDerivativeApproximator.run(new Float(x));
      System.out.println( "Sine(" + x + ") = " + result );
    }
  }
}

I ran out of time to demonstrate this, but you can also modify variables in the context from inside the closure, even though they are final, by creating a final array containing the variable, and then modifying the object contained in the array. It's not pretty but it works.

How many programming languages do you know?

Posted on June 16, 2009 at 10:31 PM

Categories: tech, meta, code

List of programming languages that I know* that appear on the Official Wikipedia List of Programming Languages**.

* Or once knew... but I could pick it up again, I swear. It's like riding a bicycle. I don't include languages that I tried to learn but failed... like Scheme and Prolog.
** Commonly recognized as the standard in Lists of Things. Let it be known that I only include those languages that are turing complete, so CSS and HTML don't count.

Begin listing:

AppleScript
BASIC (Apple ][+)
Bourne Shell
C
C++
DLX Assembler (not listed, but it's a language...)
HyperTalk (my first, favourite language!)
Java
JavaScript
Lingo
MATLAB
Modula-3 (and don't I wish I didn't?)
Objective-C
Pascal
Perl (and don't I wish I didn't?)
PHP
Python (and don't I wish I didn't? :-)
Ruby (my third, favourite language!)
μC++ (is it really a separate language? Well, it requires a separate compiler...)
Visual Basic (sufficiently different from basic BASIC)
XSLT (yes it's turing complete) (my second, favourite language)

So. Thoughts. FIrst, I can say that I know more than 20 languages. Second, my # of languages isn't going up as slowly these days, but the depth is. Third, my big hole is functional languages. Only XSLT is really functional-ish (people get mad when I say that).

I'd like to learn oCaml.

All of this work courtesy of procrastion and needing to quote a number of languages on my updated Custom Software Development page.

Rails "core team" fucks up big time

Posted on June 07, 2009 at 11:03 PM

Categories: tech, code, rails

Hey, if you have a rails app that uses the recently introduced authenticate_or_request_with_http_digest Rails 2.3 / http_authentication.rb, you've got a big fucking security hole. Anyone can log in if they provide a wrong username and no password, or a nil username & password.

Kind of terrible, right?

So Nate posts it on his blog after a week of trying to get the attention of the Rails security people, and they blame him in their security alert:

Due to communication difficulties and a mis-understanding between the reporter and the security team. This vulnerability has been publicly disclosed on several websites, users are advised to update their applications immediately. Steps are being taken to ensure that the security email is more reliable in the future. We regret the nature of this disclosure and will endeavor to ensure it doesn’t happen again in the future.

And they give him no credit. Most of the RCT idiosyncracies I can write off but don't fuck with security.

uHear -- test your hearing with an iPhone

Posted on June 04, 2009 at 11:39 PM

Categories: code, mobile, iphone

Here's a little movie I made of an iPhone app called uHear I developed for Unitron. This is also a bit of an experiment because I've uploaded the movie to Amazon S3 and you're watching it from AWS.

Anyway, the video is short, and shows you four parts of the app:

The standard hearing sensitivity test, which finds out how quiet you can hear at various pitches in each ear,
the speech & noise test, which tests if you might have trouble hearing over noise like in a restaurant,
lots of hearing-related info, and finally,
a live audiologist lookup based on your current location, powered by google maps API.

Posts tagged with code

How to interview well at Google

Posted on August 29, 2011 at 10:11 PM

Categories: tech, code, infographics, jobs

How to embed a 480p YouTube video

Posted on April 19, 2011 at 10:17 PM

Categories: code, internet

Another job opening :-) iPhone developer — learn on the job

Posted on May 04, 2010 at 04:32 PM

Categories: code, business, iphone, jobs

Bug Points

Posted on March 27, 2010 at 03:34 AM

Categories: code

Job Opening: iPhone part-time / contract coder wanted -- we'll teach you

Posted on February 11, 2010 at 03:07 AM

Categories: code, business, iphone, jobs

How to prepare a build for distribution in the App Store using the Program Portal, XCode, and iTunes Connect

Posted on September 28, 2009 at 04:59 PM

Categories: code, iphone

What happens when you don't understand open source licenses?

Posted on September 17, 2009 at 12:20 AM

Categories: tech, code, opensource

Regarding growing up your acts_as_taggable and lack of primary_key

Posted on August 12, 2009 at 07:53 PM

Categories: code, rails

Closures with return values in Java

Posted on July 07, 2009 at 12:29 AM

Categories: code, java

How many programming languages do you know?

Posted on June 16, 2009 at 10:31 PM

Categories: tech, meta, code

Rails "core team" fucks up big time

Posted on June 07, 2009 at 11:03 PM

Categories: tech, code, rails

uHear -- test your hearing with an iPhone

Posted on June 04, 2009 at 11:39 PM

Categories: code, mobile, iphone

How to do rails tests when running with restful_authentication

Posted on May 26, 2009 at 01:18 AM

Categories: code, rails, ruby

sudo apachectl stop && sudo apt-get remove apache2 && sudo apt-get install nginx

Posted on April 30, 2009 at 12:56 AM

Categories: tech, code, rails, internet

How to really URL encode an NSString in Objective-C, iPhone, etc.

Posted on April 22, 2009 at 02:52 AM

Categories: code, mac, iphone, objectivec

The better way to code error-handling routines

Posted on April 17, 2009 at 12:50 PM

Categories: code, rails, ruby

iPhone programming: how to switch to a landscape view at the moment of your choosing

Posted on February 27, 2009 at 05:12 PM

Categories: code, mobile, iphone

Wondeful joy! Mix Ruby and Objective-C with MacRuby

Posted on February 10, 2009 at 02:51 AM

Categories: code, mac, ruby

How to make WYM Editor support embed objects (such as flash videos, youtube, etc.)

Posted on February 08, 2009 at 02:27 AM

Categories: code, internet

The Big Update

How to make an iPhone button highlight (hold state)

Posted on February 05, 2009 at 07:26 PM

Categories: code, iphone

iphone objective-c pain ... give me ruby, bastards!

Posted on January 11, 2009 at 02:37 AM

Categories: code, mobile, ruby

Ruby on Rails Feed/RSS Aggregator (35 lines)

Posted on December 07, 2008 at 03:17 AM

Categories: code, rails, ruby

New version of FractalTrees X (FTX) 2 beta 1

Posted on December 03, 2008 at 02:28 AM

Categories: code, mac

Vuze (Azureus) search template for The Pirate Bay (TPB)

Posted on October 31, 2008 at 05:55 PM

Categories: code, bittorrent

Apple are idiots

Posted on October 17, 2008 at 07:22 PM

Categories: code

Hacking the java compiler: using anonymous subclasses as closures

Posted on July 10, 2008 at 11:17 PM

Categories: tech, code, java