2008.01.27
What I'd Say to Bill Gates
Bill Gates is visiting Athens tomorrow.
In his short stay he'll inaugrate Microsoft's
so-called innovation center, which is provided
as an offset for a deal Microsoft signed with the Greek government
for the purchase of 70.000 licenses, and he'll also give a talk
on Microsoft's vision for the future of technology.
As a prelude to this event
the Sunday newspaper Eleftherotypia inset
Epsilon
has invited a few Greek open-source advocates to give in a few sentences
what they would say to Bill Gates during his visit.
Continue reading "What I'd Say to Bill Gates"Last modified: Sunday, January 27, 2008 12:56 am
2008.01.23
The Mysterious TreeMap Type Signature
For my lecture notes on file handling
I wrote a small Java program to display the number of characters
that fall in each
Unicode block,
and got bitten by an unexpected
runtime error.
Angelika Langer,
a wizard of Java Generics, kindly provided me with an explanation
of the JDK design,
which I'd like to share.
Continue reading "The Mysterious TreeMap Type Signature"Last modified: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 12:34 am
2008.01.13
Rational Metaprogramming
Metaprogramming, using programs to manipulate other programs, is as old as programming. From self-modifying machine code in early computers to expressions involving partially applied functions in modern functional-programming languages, metaprogramming is an essential part of an advanced programmer’s arsenal.
Continue reading "Rational Metaprogramming"Last modified: Sunday, January 13, 2008 11:52 am
2008.01.07
The Relativity of Performance Improvements
Today, after receiving a 1.7MB daily security log message containing
thousands of ssh failed login attempts from bots around the
world, I decided I had enough.
I enabled IPFW to a FreeBSD system I maintain, and added a script
to find and block the offending IP addresses.
In the process I improved the script's performance.
The results of the improvement were unintuitive.
Continue reading "The Relativity of Performance Improvements"Last modified: Monday, January 7, 2008 11:58 am
2008.01.04
Curing MIDlet Bluetooth Disconnects
Over the last few days I've been writing a
MIDlet
to collect GPS coordinates and cell identifiers.
I'm doing this
in an effort to look at what algorithms might be needed
in order to implement something similar to Google's
My Location
service.
Here is a Google Earth example of the data I'm collecting.
Yesterday,
I reached a point where I was collecting all the information I needed,
but the program was often plagued by random disconnections of the Bluetooth
link to the GPS.
Continue reading "Curing MIDlet Bluetooth Disconnects"Last modified: Friday, January 4, 2008 2:13 pm
