Bitwise Evolution

I desperately needed to find out why the tutorials I’ve been following for an Eclipse PDE task today kept referencing a startup.jar file that I could not locate.

A couple google searches later turned up this link:

http://dev.eclipse.org/newslists/news.eclipse.platform/msg62159.html

The poster in that thread had the same problem (back in Feb. 2007), and found the answer, but none of [...]

(Edit: If you’re reading this after OSGi R4.2, then there is almost certainly a better way to accomplish the same thing)

I’ve been digging into OSGi a bit over the last week or so inorder to create some Eclipse plugins that will automatically discover eachother, and I’ve been generally impressed with the framework on the whole. The documentation [...]

The venerable Joel Spolsky asked recently why someone hasn’t made a device that clips to the back of a desk and:

* It’s a power strip
* It’s a network hub
* It’s a USB hub
* You clamp it onto the back [...]

Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood just launched the public beta of Stackoverflow today, with the intent of building a community for high-quality technical questions and answers. I’ve been using the site for about three weeks now, during the closed beta, and I’ve noticed a disturbing trend that was outlined in Joel’s announcement post today:

Want [...]

The ‘proper’ way to do user interface design is hotly contested in the OSS software development world, and the discussions usually boil down to three suggestions:

“Just write it — it’s not that hard” “Use [glade|qt designer|netbeans|…] — all the widgets are there” “Just use pencil/pen/whiteboard/etc — it’s faster”

I don’t agree with any of these — (1) is […]

With the launch of the StackOverflow beta I posed a question about python static analysis tools, as I have been playing with python and django recently for some side projects. The responses at Stack Overflow quickly pointed to PyChecker, PyFlakes and PyLint.

Over all, it was a disappointing experience. My experiences are outlined below, […]

There was once a time when your home directory was treated as a nearly sacred place, a safe haven where you had near complete control. This trust was only breached for very special reasons: user specific settings and background storage for applications could go in “dot-files”—the hidden files or directories that begin with a […]

A recent project at work required building a multi-step dialog to manage the interface between a user and an expert system (and some fairly advanced NLP to boot). On the surface this looked like a fairly standard Wizard problem — design a bunch of screens with questions, and then collect the answers as the […]

Memoization (not memorization) is the process of remembering the results of a computation for use later. (I think of it as “making a memo” to look back on later.) Memoization is the core to any dynamic programming implementation, and allows many simple algorithms to run in linear or polynomial time when they would otherwise take an exponential number […]

This is the first in an n-part series about web authentication for a system where user identification and attribution is important, but content protection is not. This entry assumes that a secure method has been used to negotiate a shared secret — as the result of username / password authentication over https, for example.

Obviously […]