I am a big fun of having the web’s huge and rich information available on mobile phones — it is really useful for the user to be able to browse the web with the mobile phone’s browser. Some time ago I was wondering how this ‘mobile browsing’ experience can be improved, and at that point [...]
I’m so happy I’m blogging again! So, everybody knows already that I am the author of the Arity Arithmetic Engine, a nice little open-source library for evaluating arithmetic expressions. In this library I put quite some attention on the elegant and minimal code, and on performance. The functionality is mainly split in two parts: compiling [...]
The blog was pretty dead lately, except for some really good comments I got on past posts on MIDlet signing — I was quite busy at the day job, and still am. But I thought I’d share the news in a tiny post: I’ve taken out the arithmetic engine from Javia Calculator, re-written it, cleaned-up [...]
JSON is the new XML. JSON, the “JavaScript Object Notation”, is a very simple notation for representing hierarchical data. It achieves what XML was supposed to do, and in a very simple way. While the XML spec is hundreds (thousands?) of pages, the JSON spec fits comfortably on one page. Although the name suggest an [...]
Today I run, for the first time, the marathon. The marathon distance is 42.195 km. I finished it in 4:28 (i.e. a little under 4 hours and a half). Although I drank a lot of isotonic drinks and water (about 2 liters) during the course, at the end of the course I was weighting with [...]
I’ve just seen the new web application Jottit, and I liked the way they get simplicity right. Because simplicity and elegance is not only in the way it looks, but also: in the size of the web pages, in the URL naming scheme, and most importantly in the interaction design. About the web page size, [...]
The problem Let’s consider the classical ITU-T 12-key phone keypad: 1 2 abc 3 def 4 ghi 5 jkl 6 mno 7pqrs 8 tuv 9 wxyz * 0 # There are two main ways to enter text using it (for example when writing an SMS): multi-tap, and predictive text input. Predictive [...]
In Java, a class literal is a construct of the form String.class, which returns the Class object that corresponds to the named class. You can use this to test the exact class of an object, like this: boolean isInteger(Object obj) { return obj.getClass() == Integer.class; } (A similar goal can be achieved by using instanceof, [...]
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A template is used to generate a text string based on some data parameters. A simple template for a letter: Dear ${name}, please pay us ${amount} dollars. You use a template like this: letterTemplate = Template(templateString) letter1 = letterTemplate(name=’John’, amount=’100′) letter2 = letterTemplate(name=’Tom’, amount=’200′) The template can be more powerful than simple text substitution, by [...]