Computers Posts

  • 07.14.08 Testers Wanted (Me, Games, Computers)

    I need a few brave people to test a pre-beta app for me. No, this is not Cloudy; it’s another app I’ve been working on in parallel. It’s called Your Move, and it’s the expanded version of my GeekGameBoard sample code. It lets you play board games against a human opponent; either at the same machine, over a local network, or by sending moves via email or iChat.… MORE

  • 07.14.08 The Ramones Sing iPhone Development (Me, Humor, Computers)

    (This is more or less to the tune of Rock’n’Roll High School, or any other Ramones song for that matter. You have to imagine Joey Ramone singing it. Johnny, you just switch between C and F every couple of lines, got it?)

    Well back in March I got my feelins hurt
    When Apple wouldn’t gimme no developer cert
    The SDK they gave me had a “simulator”—Fooled around with it, then said “see you lator!”

    (iPhone, iPhone, iPhone developer)… MORE

  • 07.04.08 Doing application updates via version-control (Ideas, Computers)

    I just had an interesting idea, brought on by a post to an Apple developer list asking about software-update mechanisms for Mac applications. The library everyone uses for this is Sparkle, which is wonderful in all ways except bandwidth usage: it updates the app by downloading an entire zip archive of the new version. With many apps nowadays being 10MB or even 100MB downloads, that’s pretty significant.

    This could clearly be improved a lot by downloading a delta instead, then using that to patch the current copy of the app. And this is done on some other platforms. But then an even better idea occurred to me: Release your application in the form of a working tree of a distributed version-control system [DVCS] like Mercurial. You also maintain on your server a repository containing all the versions of the application. Whenever you release a new version, you simply check it into that repository as an update of the previous release. Now, when a copy of the app wants to update itself, it simply does an “hg pull” (or equivalent) of itself from the repository URL.… MORE

  • 06.17.08 JavaScript 2.0, aka ECMAScript 4 (Web, Languages, Computers)

    I just discovered that there is an ECMAScript 4—better known as JavaScript 2.0—in development. As a shameless language slut, I immediately dove into the language overview, and it’s pretty neat.

    This turns JavaScript into a much more useable language, that I could see doing serious development in. I’m well aware that today’s JS isn’t a “toy”, that it’s got an interesting prototype-based object model under the hood; but I’ve found the language so loose as to be difficult to use. This new version adds a full class model, much better support for iteration, a form of generators/coroutines, and more.… MORE

  • 06.04.08 BLIP news (Python! Detailed spec!) (Computers)
  • 05.30.08 Rails Help, Please? (How to create a login/account system) (Web, Computers)

    I hope some of you reading this are Ruby On Rails experts and have a moment to help me out. My problem in a nutshell: What Rails generator/plugin should I use to create a user account / login system, preferably with OpenID, in a new app?… MORE

  • 05.28.08 BLIP-Protocol mailing list (Computers)

    I’ve created a BLIP-Protocol mailing list on Google Groups. Please join up if you’re interested in learning, using, re-implementing, improving, extending…… MORE

  • 05.25.08 BLIP: Come ‘n’ get it! (Computers)

    I’ve released the source code to my “BLIP” protocol implementation, as part of a project I call “MYNetwork”, for “Mooseyard Networking Libraries”. API documentation is available online, and you can check out or browse the source code from its Mercurial repository. For the really curious, there’s even a sketchy overview of the protocol’s wire format.

    It’s working quite well for me in Cloudy; it’s been a while since I’ve found any outright bugs, although I know … MORE

  • 05.16.08 BLIP update (Computers)

    I’ve got my new BLIP protocol all implemented now. After my previous post on Monday:

    • On Tuesday I implemented message metadata.
    • On Wednesday I got SSL working (configuring the “server” side to verify the “client’s” cert was difficult.)
    • On Thursday I put Cloudy up on blocks, pried out Vortex and my Obj-C wrapper library, and replaced them with BLIP.
    • And on Friday (today) I debugged.

    Cloudy’s back up and running, and all its features work. So, … MORE

  • 05.12.08 The Fine Line Between Clever And Stupid (Computers)

    It’s that old “make vs. buy” trade-off, or “write vs. reuse” in this case: do you go with an existing library, even if it’s problematic, or do you write your own implementation from scratch?
    What am I talking about? The networking code in Cloudy.… MORE

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