I’ve always questioned the wisdom of building a startup company based around someone else’s platform, like Facebook games or Gmail inbox add-ons. You’re totally at the mercy of the other company. (Many people have found out how silly it was to go up against Microsoft or Apple in just the same way.)
And yet, here I [...]
Tag Archives: my projects
Hummingbird Updated to Version 0.60
Thursday, August 20th, 2009 – 7:49 pm
An Installation Shell-Script for Palm Prē Developers
Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 – 3:28 pm
Last week, I wrote that I'd been working on a script to easily install homebrew apps on the Palm Prē. It now looks like there are much better ways to handle such things — I've become quite a fan of fileCoaster, myself, and of course webOSQuickInstall is a wonderful piece of work, as well. But just [...]
Productivity on Various Fronts
Sunday, July 26th, 2009 – 5:56 pm
I’ve actually made some progress on coding projects this weekend. My Palm Prē “Magic 8 Ball” application now responds to the Prē’s accelerometer: if you rotate the Prē, the app stays right-side up (including readjusting the position of the backdrop image). Even cooler, you no longer have to tap a button to trigger the fortune; [...]
Announcement: Hummingbird Upgraded to Version 0.51
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 – 3:11 pm
I’ve just upgraded Hummingbird from version 0.5 to its new version: 0.51. Since I recently starting using the #PalmPrē hashtag in my tweets, I suddenly noticed that Hummingbird didn’t make hashtags clickable.
Well, now it does.
The change is pretty minimal, but it also incurred some overhead in my web site: the Hummingbird web page needed to [...]
Notes on LJ Content Sieve
Saturday, July 4th, 2009 – 2:07 pm
My latest project is something I call “LJ Content Sieve”: a Greasemonkey script to filter out content on one’s Livejournal views based on nearly any attribute of a post or comment.
However, Livejournal is very customizable. It has 31 different “layouts”, each of which can then be further “themed” by application of CSS. This means that [...]
Would Shlemiel the Painter Optimize Prematurely?
Thursday, June 18th, 2009 – 2:34 pm
I don’t want to optimize this code prematurely. And “while you’re still writing it” is probably premature. On the other hand, totally ignoring algorithmic complexity is a sure route to a Shlemiel the Painter’s algorithm.
Do I really want to just write the whole thing, and then start profiling it to see where the hot spots [...]
Launching SSHblock
Tuesday, June 16th, 2009 – 11:59 am
My latest software project is now available… where “latest” means “the latest thing I’ve launched, even if I actually wrote it over a year ago.”
The story is simple: I was tired of seeing “failed password” messages from sshd cluttering up my logs. I was also annoyed at the constant flow of dictionary attacks, even if [...]
Eyeball-Deep in Legalese
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 – 5:37 pm
I used to not have a problem when I wanted to release software. I’d just release it under the GPL (what we’d now call the GPLv2), and be pretty happy with that decision.
Now there’s GPLv3, and I’m really uncertain whether I like it at all. I understand that Tivoization is a serious problem, but I [...]
Announcing Hummingbird
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 – 1:01 pm
If you read Coyote Tracks*, you’ve probably noticed that I recently set up a thing over there in the right-hand side that says “My Latest Tweets”. At first, that was just a little PHP widget that I’d hacked together myself. But then I realized it could actually be useful to other people, because it does [...]
Site Updated and Software Publication
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 – 3:57 pm
Just updated my software page to bring it a little more up-to-date with what I’ve been doing in the past few years. It’s funny to see how my coding style has evolved and grown continually over that time. There were some things I used to be showing off that were almost totally procedural; even some [...]