Randomshouting

I haven’t published a post in a while so I decided to start writing book reviews in hope to force myself to write more posts in the future. The first review will be for the Effective Java Second Edition book by Joshua Bloch since it’s the last book that I read. In fact, I just finished it few minutes ago.

While working on the new, improved version of Tutorijali.net we have decided to use the WMD markdown editor. While using it, we have discovered that it has many annoying bugs, and isn’t easy to modify. Searching for a better markdown editor which is small, and doesn’t have external dependicies, yielded no results. So I decided to write a small, easy to modify, markdown editor.

“C++0x feels like a new language: The pieces just fit together better than they used to and I find a higher-level style of programming more natural than before and as efficient as ever.” — Bjarne Stroustrup

I got my hands on a brand new, SIM locked and unrooted Galaxy S and well, I had to take action as I couldn’t use SIM cards from other cellular service providers. It turns out that the solution is (assuming that your phone is already rooted) as easy as changing one byte (literally). I had some issues while trying to root my phone because I couldn’t find a corresponding CF-Root file for my JPP build of Android 2.2. So if you’r in the same situation, simply upgrade your Galaxy S to 2.2.1 first and then apply the CF-Root patch for the JPY build. You can find more information about CF-Root patches on the xda-developers forum.

Google is known for having an API for just about everything and one of them can be used to receive SMS notifications from your embedded electronics project, your robot or from some sensor grid in your evil underground laboratory. In this case “free” comes with a price. You’re limited to ~60 characters. But, that should be enough for sending simple notifications or alerts. I have originally used this to alert users that they have received a new message in a project that was supposed to make texting from mobile phones a lot cheaper by using mobile data. And it did (the cost of one SMS was around 0.01$) but the project never gained momentum, mainly because I didn’t need cheap text messages anymore. Long story short, the project involved one HTTP API implemented in Python (on Google App Engine) and one J2ME application for phones. This worked because mobile Internet access was cheaper than SMS messages in my country.

I’m a self-thought programmer (although chasing a computer science degree) and for some reason I have picked up some good habits and some bad ones too. For now, lets talk about the good ones.

Being a programmer I have always wished to have bleeding-edge hardware and dreamed of having a multi-core CPU or some monster GPU that could eat little kitties and a memory bank that could store the whole HDD.

I’ve just finished reading a great post from Steven Benner and I couldn’t agree more. He sums it up in one sentence:

I’m currently testing the free EC2 micro instance and I’m very pleased by now. I think it suits my needs and I can always upgrade if I need to. I have also abandoned my blog solution as I’m not interested in developing it further. Right now I need something ready and functional so I installed WordPress.