Are You On The Right Track...

On my latest side project, I have found myself using some classical data structures and algorithms, ala The 1970s:

• Finite State Automata
• Directed Acyclic Graph (also makes a good FSA)
• Topological Sort

This is on top of the usual assortment of ArrayLists and HashMaps that are now ubiquitous, but back-in-the-day, we had to build that shit ourselves.

I'm taking liberty there, because I was A Child during The 1970s. I didn't know what a hash function was yet, but I was tinkering with BASIC on some old TTYs with the acoustic-coupled modems.

Takes you back to a simpler time, doesn't it?

I just hope it means I'm on the right track....

OMFG I Went Back In Time!

This is hilarious....

I came in this morning, and as part of the usual ritual, I removed the top sheet of the notepad, which contained the previous day's notes. Each day has the date in the upper left.

I'm looking at that sheet, and plain as day, I had written 2007 as the year! There was no mistake; I cross my sevens European-style. I went through the entire day yesterday, oblivious to the fact that I had travelled 2 years backward in time. Wow! I wrote that down without so much as a second-thought to it being wrong.

I'm sure there was a seven in my head somewhere while I was writing it. I scribbled a nine over it, but you can tell it was overwritten. Oh well.

Android Rocks, ME Still Piece-of-Shit

Not technically part of the Piece-of-Shit series, this post leverages your familiarity with it.

I have my Android ADP1, and I am jamming!

I am accessing Contact List, Current Location, everything, and all without annoying user prompting or paying Certificate Authority fees!

I am also happily using the JRE1.5 feature set, which includes annotations and generics, making for some downright fun development.

You see, I have freed myself from the straightjacket woven by that other piece-of-shit Java-based mobile platform.

Of course, the damage control is on. We are seeing JavaFX Mobile coming.

This sounds promising, but I have already built desktop JavaFX applications, and I can tell you it is a big fat memory hog! You cannot run a non-trivial application without tons of heap space because it connects all of your binds (can't do UI anything without those) into a big evaluation graph, so that boolean in your app is way bigger than one byte! Not to mention all the memory it needs for those nifty animation effects and whatnot. Last I checked, most mobile platforms don't have 500MB of Free Memory in them!

The Jail is Broken. Praise Your Favorite Deity for that!

Malaise

Man, I just realized I haven't posted dick in over a month!

That's just no way of keeping up with yearly posting targets and what-not.

There has been activity, just not on this blog; not like I'm neglecting many anyway, after all, you can see there's only 2 followers, and you don't even want to look at my Google Analytics page for this blog!

Like many other industrious developers, I am working on some Android Market mojo. My current incarnation is selling for free and enjoying a 3-star rating and people are contacting me and asking for features (of all things) and it's actually fun and makes me feel good about building shit.

Man that was some long-ass sentence that last one....