Wirehead on Hacking

This will start to contain all of my noises and ruminations about hacking, hardware projects, gadgets and the art of programming.

Some notes on developing for Windows Mobile 2008-04-20 01:31PM

How I replicate a now-commercial work-around for a fairly fundamental hole in Microsoft Windows Mobile functionality.

iPhone SDK vs. GPL (via) 2008-04-16 12:48PM

My rant: One can write all the GPL'd open-source whatever software that will do all kinds of rotten things to a Microsoft Windows Mobile 6 device that Microsoft doesn't intend for you to be able to do. But you can't do that with an iPhone.

KDE still worse than Windows, FLV's at 11. 2008-04-12 04:32PM

Why I invariably end up using a fairly bare X environment and never KDE or GNOME.

Maildir... the one true mail format (more or less) 2008-04-09 11:29AM

When I was using an mbox-based mail system, every so often I would have a mail corruption bug where "something" would go wrong. My Outlook email box has gone funky in the past and not all of the data is stored in an especially well documented place either.

Some observations on rebuilding a box with Ubuntu 2008-03-23 08:10PM

Thoughts about installing Ubuntu... and some hard drive failure fun.

Query anything with SQLite Virtual Tables (via) 2008-03-10 11:10PM

This looks interesting. I use SQLite in PhotoHub and there might be some neat tricks to be had there.

doodle (via) 2008-03-10 08:59AM

Makes a whole new way to construct a Ruby object that's simpler and more declarative. I've come to love languages where you can pull stunts like this...

A screencast is NOT a replacement for documentation 2008-03-07 10:50AM

Why you shouldn't use screencasts as the sole source of documentation.

Excel the 3D environment (via) 2008-03-07 10:48AM

I'm not entirely sure if this is a massive leg-pull or if this is something useful.

So you hacked our site! (via) 2008-03-01 02:46PM

This is great. There's a continual chain of bottom-feeder-companies out there who specialize in selling an entry in a directory that everybody just tosses in the trash bin for $$$$$. Combine that with the desire to spend as little money on things that don't impress the clients and a desire to not have prospective clients be able to call up existing clients to find out how useless the service really is....

STL vector performance (via) 2008-02-28 11:08AM

Nice analysis. I wrote some code that intelligently called reserve() a long time ago but then ripped it out. Maybe I shouldn't have...

A ruby time zone bug 2008-02-24 03:53PM

A subtle bug I found in the ruby timezone handling

Java doesn't run everywhere? Is this supposed to be news? (via) 2008-02-22 11:20AM

I remember working on a product that was rewritten to be partially in Java partially in C++ (because Java wasn't fast enough). By the end of it, I pointed out that they could have ported it once (from Unix to Windows) and it would have taken less time.

Don't think like this (via) 2008-02-22 11:18AM

This is an example of how you can use logical arguments to say something really stupid. Just because you can imagine a program that runs for the expected lifespan of a computer yet doesn't fill up the address space doesn't mean that I can't imagine a program able to fill even a 64 bit address space within a very short amount of time.

Firefox 3 to have a custom malloc (via) 2008-02-20 11:32PM

I've seen this before many times. 99% of the time, your program probably can rely on a badly implemented reference count GC. But there's this one percent of the time where you need to pierce through all of the layers of abstraction and really grasp what's going on. This is why computer science programs that teach Java will always be inferior to programs that force students to program some level of assembler and C.

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