Just a note: the Facebook Chat data in my post regarding configuration settings for Pidgin and Facebook Chat can be used in any chat client that can connect to XMPP. You just may have to play around with your settings to see what goes where.
Facebook Chat XMPP Configuration
March 1st, 2010Facebook Chat XMPP Settings with Pidgin
February 11th, 2010Facebook, earlier this week, released their new XMPP Facebook Chat which now allows any XMPP-enabled chat client to connect to Facebook chat. For whatever reason I thought this was already how things were done, but I guess not. I just set this up with Pidgin and figured I’d share the information.
Importing Color Schemes Cleanly into Eclipse
December 27th, 2009Eclipse, for any Java developer, is a tool that is almost as essential for developing Java application as the Java docs itself. The compiler even. With it’s huge plugin set and ability to do almost anything you want automatically, it is no surprise why you will probably find this IDE in where where Java is developed.
Then you start using it. One of my main complaints about Eclipse is that there is no way to export the color scheme in use without exporting with it other computer-specific settings. I don’t want to export which specific JRE location to use because it won’t be the same on a Mac and Windows. Nor do I want to export other settings, probably having to do with plugins installed. And I especially don’t want another user’s recently used workspace locations. So what do you do?
Project Euler Problem 1
December 23rd, 2009So, I’m starting this much sooner than I would have anticipated but I suddenly got the urge to start.
Problem 1 is pretty straight forward:
If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.
Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.
Project Euler – Coding For Fun and Knowledge
December 17th, 2009About a year or so ago, I was told of this site, Project Euler. Unfortunately I didn’t get into it back then, but an email from a mailing list that I’m apart of re-sparked my interest in it. In case you haven’t heard of it before, here is the description of it from the site:
Twitter-Based Exception Logger
November 20th, 20091 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 | try { //some code goes here } catch (Exception e) { logToTwitter("Application Name", e.getStackTrace()); } |
iPhone Development – Is It Really That Easy? (fin)
August 17th, 2009I guess I’ve lagged on completing this blog entry series for long enough.
Indeed I was able to complete my application in the time frame I set out for. The application itself worked pretty well. I know I could have made it a lot better if I were actually able to get the application onto my iPhone during the development phase or have the simulator use the iTunes library as the basis for its library. I am now debating whether or not I want to put the application up on Apple’s App Store.
On iPhone and Android-Powered Phones and Security
August 10th, 2009I don’t mean for this to be a big entry, but I just wanted to point something out. I was reading the interview with Charlie Miller (of, recently, iPhone SMS vulnerability fame) and he said something that I never really thought about until now:
As an aside, Android implemented their SMS stack with Java. Therefore, it was not possible to corrupt memory, instead, we just got unhandled exceptions. So our attacks were limited to denial of service.
Since all of Android’s applications are actually written in Java rather than Objective C, this gives Android a bit more security when dealing with 3rd party code. Don’t get me wrong, as a developer I have to qualify that with though probably still possible, just harder to accomplish, there will probably be nothing as bad on Android phones as this iPhone SMS “threat” was. The best you can hope for is to crash Android’s JVM.
If Apple is so anal about trying to protect ATT’s cellular towers and thereby claiming jailbreaking an iPhone is bad, then why would they allow such a low level language to be the language of choice for developing on the iPhone? This is what happens when a company wants to push their language into even more of the mainstream.
On the Subjects of object == null and collection.size() == 0
July 28th, 2009Let’s just get one thing straight here people, an object that is null does not mean the same thing as a collection/array of length zero. I’m sort of seeing this more and more as I continue my existence on this planet and I say we put a stop to this now. Take this example method declaration (written in Java):
public Collection<searchresult> getSearchResults(String searchTerm);</searchresult>
Straight forward enough, I would hope. This method takes in a searchTerm String, magic happens (ah abstraction), and a Collection of type SearchResult is returned. Now here is the kicker: what happens if the search query resulted in no results? What should be returned? And why?
