October 17, 2010
Like many other people, I first saw the Mandelbrot Set in an issue of Scientific American in 1985. Before long I had written a program in BBC BASIC to perform the computation, and set my BBC Micro’s 2MHz 6502 churning away. Because it took so long to render an image–even at the Beeb’s meager 256×160 [...]
Filed under: Programming | Comments (1)
October 14, 2010
Something that often confuses people new to JavaScript is the use of the function keyword. That’s because it represents two completely different operations, both called function. First of all, there’s the lambda operator “function”. It works exactly like (lambda) in Scheme, {|| } in Ruby, or λ in lambda calculus. That is, it binds one [...]
Filed under: JavaScript, Programming | Comments (0)
October 8, 2010
Getting an HTTP JVM: java.security.InvalidKeyException: Illegal key size error trying to use cryptography in a Java agent in IBM Lotus Domino? You need to update your server’s policy files. Here’s how.
Filed under: Domino, Java, Linux | Comments (0)
July 30, 2010
Yesterday I wrote about accusations of spyware on the Android Market. Today, the story got a bit more complicated. First of all, the anti-spyware vendor which originated the story “clarified” their findings, saying: While the data this app is accessing is certainly suspicious coming from a wallpaper app, we want to be clear that there [...]
Filed under: Android | Comments (0)
July 29, 2010
In the news right now are a set of Android wallpaper apps by Jackeey Wallpaper, that are alleged to steal user data and send it to a web site operated by someone in China. Many people are taking this as some sort of proof that Apple’s jailed developer approach is the only one that can [...]
Filed under: Android | Comments (1)
June 1, 2010
Lotus Domino’s LotusScript language has a function called Format. If you pass it a date/time value, and use the custom format string “ww”, it’s supposed to return the week number. Unfortunately, it returns the wrong value. I was prepared to be charitable and assume that it returned the correct value according to some non-standard algorithm, [...]
Filed under: LotusScript, Programming | Comments (0)
May 7, 2010
Suppose you want to install a DB2 server, and connect to it from some client software. If you browse the IBM DB2 Software pages, you’ll soon find that there’s a bewildering array of products with confusingly similar names. For example, IBM Data Server Client and IBM Data Server Runtime Client are two different things. Fortunately, [...]
Filed under: Java, Ruby | Comments (0)
April 12, 2010
A script to safely and automatically remove unneeded kernels from Ubuntu systems.
Filed under: Linux, Ruby, System administration | Comments (3)
March 2, 2010
As I’ve written before, date and time calculations are surprisingly difficult. What’s more, even the bits that aren’t difficult often get messed up. Sony have just demonstrated this. Apparently, a firmware bug in the real time clock in some models of PS3 lead the RTC to think that 2010 is a leap year. This confused [...]
Filed under: Business, Programming | Comments (0)
January 31, 2010
In October of last year, someone built a new RubyGems hosting site called Gemcutter. Everyone liked it so much that GitHub decided to stop offering RubyGem hosting, and point people at Gemcutter instead. Then the maintainer of RubyGems decided to make Gemcutter the default repository for gems when you install RubyGems. Then RubyForge decided to [...]
Filed under: Programming, Ruby | Comments (0)