December 2008
2 posts
Twitter
I give in — I’ll try using twitter. Let’s see if I can write interesting posts about what I’m working on in 140 characters or less.
http://twitter.com/landonfuller
November 2008
1 post
September 2008
1 post
Watch(Click the movie to start playback. Double click to play again.)
Our CoverFlow implementation for the iPhone. Send an e-mail if you’re interested in licensing it.
August 2008
1 post
Google's NSXMLDocument Replacement for iPhone
If you’re missing a decent Objective-C DOM-based XML library for the iPhone, Google has a NSXMLDocument replacement available under the Apache license, as part of their Objective-C GData Library:
See XMLSupport and GDataDefines.h
I’ve also had some success replacing missing classes using the Cocotron implementations — I’m using Cocotron’s NSPredicate implementation...
July 2008
4 posts
Sun Approved: Merge from BSD Java to OpenJDK
Sun has approved merging the JRL-licensed BSD Java to the GPLv2+ClassPath OpenJDK-6. That means that all of the BSD Java changes, including the SoyLatte Mac OS X port, can now be sent to the OpenJDK project, and an official BSD porters group can be proposed:
The purpose of this letter is to confirm our understanding that you are providing to Sun under the terms of the Sun Contributor Agreement...
Book: Geographic Information Systems and Science
This week I spent a couple days reading through Geographic Information Systems and Science (Paul Longley, Michael Goodchild, David Maguire, David Rhind).
The book is an excellent introduction to GIS — covering everything from basic principals and vocabulary to statistical analysis and project planning. In this, I’d place the book up there with Data Modeling Essentials or Applied...
Ruby the new Visual Basic?
Has Ruby become the new rapid application development tool for common application developers? Ruby seems to be filling the traditional roles (and seeing the same sorts of developers) as tools like VisualBasic or REALBasic, especially in terms of rapid development of web applications (as opposed to desktop applications).
Doing some Googling, I’m not the first one to ask this question: Is...
Free Street Map Data?
If you’re interested in GIS, you’ve surely come across the OpenStreetMap project — they’re working to “provide free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them.”
Only problem is their rather unexpected choice of license for their data: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license
See: OpenStreetMap License
This choice of licensing...
May 2008
2 posts
Lighting up Municiple Internet Access →
This is the right way to bring about municiple networking — displace the cable and telephone duopoly through open access to municiple fiber.
Virtual Machine, SQL Database ... or Both?
Spending today working with Jonathan on some iPhone/Mac Objective-C libraries for SQLite (managing data/schema migrations, etc), I stumbled across this bit of documentation:
After the parser assembles tokens into complete SQL statements, it calls the code generator to produce virtual machine code that will do the work that the SQL statements request.
Cool! SQLite’s Virtual Database Engine...
April 2008
7 posts
Research in Software Development
In programming, I find that the purpose of research isn’t to find the solution, but to find the problem. If I find the solution too, that’s a happy bonus.
A 1995 Objective-C Toolkit for Building... →
W3Kit implements a component-based architecture that bears many similarities to Seaside’s WAComponent.
User interactions with the application are implemented using a message passing abstraction, and application state is actually maintained across CGI-invocations. The state is saved client-side, through the use of object serialization (no, really) and hidden form fields.
The tenacity of the...
New Java HotSpot Internals Wiki →
This is pretty handy — HotSpot documentation can be scarce outside of Sun. Also see John Rose’s Announcement on hotspot-dev.
Temporary Fixes
An externality is an impact (positive or negative) on any party not involved in a given economic transaction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
I talk about “externalities” a lot; humans excel at rationalizing short-sighted decisions if they believe that the long-term costs are external to themselves. This is usually an unconcious decision, but no less costly to a...
Hardware isn't Cheap
I’ve spent the weekend researching libraries, frameworks, and languages intended to improve the web development experience. Many of these frameworks impose classic fork() concurrency model, holding the mantra that “Hardware is cheap”.
When developers say “Hardware is cheap” in response to poor architectural choices, what they’re really saying is that...