Category Archives: programming

Last week I have shown you the bare bone basics of LaTeX. We learned how to create a simple hello world document, and the usual boilerplate code that goes into the preamble. Lets move on to slightly more complex ideas. … Continue reading →

I’ve been playing around with C# lately putting together a little app that would collect hardware information about the computer it was running on. Stuff like CPU speed, amount of installed memory, CPU manufacturer, amount of cache, make and model … Continue reading →

Few days ago Travis gave me an idea for a new series of posts. He mentioned recommending my blog to a friend who was trying to learn LaTex. Unfortunately, my blog is not the best learning resource. It is more … Continue reading →

Last week I wrote about developing a simple hello world app for your blackberry. Today I want to go one step further and show you how to make a real world application that actually does something. Of course since we … Continue reading →

I almost forgot about this post. It got stuck in the draft queue for a few weeks now, but since I’m running low on postable content, I decided to resurrect it, clean it up and post it. As promised, I … Continue reading →

Here is a neat HTML trick for printing HTML tables that most people don’t know about. Btw, designing your page to print well, is actually a joyless task full of insurmountable obstacles such as lack of any page break support … Continue reading →

Guess what time is it kids? It’s time for yet another boring, technical post. It’s that sort of week. Or rather it was – I usually queue my posts approximately 8-10 days in advance. This means that if I get … Continue reading →

You learn something new every day. Here is a neat little SQL trick that I just learned. As usual, this post is mostly here for my future reference, and of course the overall good of the humankind. I hope someone … Continue reading →

Few months ago, I got myself a Blackberry Storm. It is a neat little device whose main fault is essentially the fact that it is not an iPhone. It’s essentially a hybrid. On one hand it tries to be more … Continue reading →

When I saw IE8 being pushed out via Windows Update I was ecstatic. This meant that in a few months the number of installations of the first semi-standards compliant browser made by Microsoft will reach a critical mass. At that … Continue reading →

Here is an interesting story that I got from one of the old-timers in our industry. The guy who told it to me used to be a COBOL developer back in the day when Cobol was the “bleeding edge” technology. … Continue reading →

What I am about to show you is known as the Design Circle or 360 Degree Design principle. It states that you initial design and/or layout is usually correct, but it will never be accepted by the client who will … Continue reading →

I make my living as a software developer, and this confuses people when they hear me bashing DRM. They are perplexed by the fact that someone who writes software may be so vehemently opposed to copyright protection tools. After all, … Continue reading →

As promised, I’m posting my semi-working sql parser below. You should keep in mind that the code is still very immature and full of bugs. One of my reasons for posting it here is that people will start playing around … Continue reading →

As you may know, I teach a introductory computer course in the evenings. One of the topics we cover are databases. Of course this is not a programming class, so there is a limited amount of things we can actually … Continue reading →

Back in February I showed you how to create a nice looking, dynamic home page on Google AppEngine. This implementation had major flaw – namely ugly URL’s. I have set it up so that the name of the page to … Continue reading →

Let me know if this has ever happened to you. Your boss walks up to you and tells you he has a tiny little, itsy, bitsy project for you. He wants you to build a small online application. Nay, a … Continue reading →

Anyone who has been blogging for at least few years now, can attest to this: Youtube videos sometimes go away after they have been up for a while. Most of the video hosting services do not have policy of deleting … Continue reading →

Back in the day I used to have a fan site devoted to a pretty Australian actress Gigi Edgley. This is ancient history, and it predates this blog and therefore most of you guys. The website was primitive, clobbered together … Continue reading →

This scenario happens to me at least once a week if not more often. I see a name of a product, project, movie, video game or just an unfamiliar brand name of some sort and I proceed to google it … Continue reading →

I know we discussed indent styles once before, but I figured we might as well do it again. This time, I figured we might as well make it a poll and see which of these styles appears to be the … Continue reading →

It is no longer OK to use IE6. If I see it on your screen, I swear that I will hold you down and forcefully install IE8 on your machine. I’m not joking here. I may not be able to … Continue reading →

Here is a problem I’ve been having for a while now: large HTML tables take way to long to render, especially under IE. Why do you use tables, you ask? To display large amounts of data on the screen – … Continue reading →

I’m a big fan of Firebug. I believe that if you do any kind of web development, that’s the one Firefox extension you NEED to have on your computer. It is simply indispensable and I miss it greatly when I … Continue reading →

Stuff like this saddens me: Apparently if you can read some sloppy, malformed pseudo-code thrown together by an idiot marketroid with no knowledge of programming you must be a total loser.This advertisement is yet another example in a very common … Continue reading →