Like Speaking French in Russian

Remember that ‘Most Interesting Man in the World’ commercial, where the narrator said he could speak French in Russian? That’s what this post reminded me of. Because to solve a problem recently, I had to extend a Java class… in JavaScript. One of the drawbacks of cloud-based subscription hosting of software is the flexibility that […]

Nation Namer

(Originally published February 22, 2009) Here’s a little algorithm I’ve been using to generate names for fake nations. I wouldn’t normally have put the randomness method directly into the factory class, and in my implementation I am using log4j, but for the purpose of this post, I decided it would be easy to put everything […]

PSP Companion

(Originally posted September 4, 2006) This is my first post about a new piece of utility software that I’m working on. I’ve tentatively named it PSP Companion, and unlike most of the other PSP software out there for video, images, and music, this one is for managing web articles for offline reading on the portable […]

PERL-Compatible Regular Expressions – Windows Makefile

(Originally published January 5, 2009) Recently, for a project at work I needed a 64-bit Windows version of Perl Compatible Regular Expressions. I didn’t want to use a binary built by a third party, so I chose to build it from the latest sources myself, mainly for reproducibility. Also, I don’t know if a 64-bit […]

WebSphere 6.1 Gotcha

(Originally published January 25, 2009) I found this little gotcha in WebSphere Application Server (WAS) 6.1 for Windows. I don’t know if it’s documented, but it’s certainly something to be aware of, as I don’t believe the behaviour is what most users might expect. Normally if you start WAS from a console window using the […]

Tomatoes, Apples, and Bananas: Oh my!

(Originally published November 5, 2015) Suppose you have a tomato, an apple, and a banana. The tomato bruises easily and is red. The apple is red and is hand-eaten. The banana is hand-eaten. Tomato: Bruises, redApple: Hand-eaten, redBanana: Hand-eaten You also have three containers, each of which can contain a single piece of fruit. One […]

-1

(Originally published October 12, 2008) At my job I spend a fair amount of time porting software. Porting is difficult, and in the product I work on, which is fairly mature, most of the issues I run into are configuration or environmental, and not problems with the code. It’s interesting to find things in the […]