Devolio

Saturday, December 27. 2008

My first market game

I had some free time to kill over my holiday break, so I wrote a small little game to kill boredom. It's a simple yahtzee implementation.

Having not known there was already one, I just decided to go for it. Took about 12 hours, but it was fun.

It's called Yz, and you can get it on the market. Games -> Casual

Monday, November 3. 2008

Hiatus Complete!

I've been incredibly busy lately, and I sincerely apologize for the lack of updates. I never even fathomed that I could be this busy when I started this site. With my hiatus complete, things are going to change around here, hopefully for the better. So without further ado, here's what I'm going to be changing over the next week, give or take a few days.

Pare down on the daily news

Quite obviously, I'm not the most timely source of news. You've got other sources I'm sure you get your news from, so I won't inundate you with more of the same.

Ramp up on the amount of quality articles

I've got quite a large backlog of articles to update, finish and post, so over the next few weeks I'll be chugging through and posting them. (Hallelujah!)

Move to a more powerful server

This has been in the works for awhile, I've just been too busy to make sure it goes down without a hitch. Business behind me, this will probably the first on my list to be completed.

Android Articles

Like (hopefully) some of you, I'm the proud owner of a new G1. Being a developer, I can't ignore how wonderful this is going to be for the developers like me that love hacking around with open source software, and handsets. So I'm going to be doing a series of articles on development for the Android platform.

Complete revamp of the aesthetics

The current layout of the site I do enjoy, however, it's a bit too busy for my tastes. I've been meaning to do this for awhile, again, I just haven't gotten around to it.

I'm sure there's something (or two) that I forgot, but I digress. Once again, I apologize for my lack of updates. I'll be much better about updating regularly going forward.

And last but not least, a sincere Thank You to those of you who still come back daily and check for updates; I wouldn't be here without you. Comments, as always, are greatly appreciated. Let me know exactly (or not so exactly, that's up to you) what you want to see more and less of. I'm always listening.

Monday, September 15. 2008

CodeWeavers brings Chromium to Linux and Mac (sort of)

So on Thursday, September 4th, I called a company Fire Drill. I said I wanted to ship ported versions of Chromium for Mac and Linux, and I wanted to do it as fast as possible. By Friday, we had a first working build. But it had a major problem - you couldn't do https sites, so logging in to Gmail, for example, was right out. Unfortunately, supporting that required that we finish the implementation of a nearly brand new DLL in Wine - the winhttp dll. Luckily for us, Hans Leiddeker had recently joined CodeWeavers, and in a bit of a hazing ritual, we asked him to scramble madly to implement what we needed. A little more than a week later, and he had done it. Of course, there were many other people who pitched in and tuned Wine to make Chromium just that much nicer.

via Slashdot

Tuesday, September 2. 2008

Google to launch new open source browser: Chrome

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we've now made the comic publicly available -- you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

Wednesday, August 27. 2008

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 Now Available

You’ll find versions for 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008. In addition to English, IE8 Beta 2 is available in Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), and German. Additional languages will be available soon.

While Beta 1 was for developers, we think that anyone who browses or works on the web will enjoy IE8 Beta 2. Before the team blogs about our Beta 2 in detail, here’s an overview of what you’ll find in IE8. You can get it here.

Monday, August 25. 2008

Data Filtering Using PHP's Filter Functions - Part one

Filtering data. We all have to do it. Most, if not all of us, despise doing it. However, unbeknown to most are PHP's filter_* functions, that allow us to do all sorts of filtering and validation. Using PHP's filter_* functions, we can validate and sanitize data types, URLs, e-mail addresses, IP addresses, strip bad characters, and more, all with relative ease. This is part one of two, covering filter_var() and the different constants and flags that can be set.
Continue reading "Data Filtering Using PHP's Filter Functions - Part one"

Saturday, August 23. 2008

Firefox to get massive JavaScript performance boost

Mozilla is leveraging an impressive new optimization technique to bring a big performance boost to the Firefox JavaScript engine. The code was merged today (but is not yet ready to be enabled by default in the nightly builds) and is planned for inclusion in Firefox 3.1, the next incremental update of the open-source web browser.

They are "getting ready to take JavaScript performance into the next tier" with a radically innovative optimization tactic called tracing that has already produced performance improvements ranging between 20 and 40 times faster in some cases. They believe that this is just the beginning of what can be accomplished with tracing, and they expect to be able to achieve even better speed as the work continues.

via Slashdot, ars technica

Practical Uses for the PHP Tokenizer

When PHP has to process a request, the engine goes through several passes of parsing until the code is expressed as a set of instructions that the interpreter can execute. The first such step is “lexical scanning”, which splits the code into smaller strings called “tokens”. The token is the smallest meaningful unit of your source code, and it can represent a reserved word (for, while, class, if, etc.), operator (+, -, *, /, && etc.), value literals (integers, floats, strings etc.) and other special symbols.

The same lexical scanner which PHP uses, is also available to userspace PHP developers via the function token_get_all().

Saturday, August 16. 2008

The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Premature Standardization

The web is made of open standards. This was a significant factor in the web’s displacement of proprietary application platforms. Openness is hugely attractive, so much so that the web dominates over competitors with better technologies. The difficult tradeoff that comes with a standards-based approach is that it is difficult to innovate. As a result, the basic technologies of the browser have been stalled for a decade. What innovation we’ve enjoyed, such as the Ajax revolution, has come by mining all of the latent, accidental potential of the existing standards. That potential has been used up.

Thursday, August 14. 2008

Dynamically Creating Graphs and Charts with PHP and GDChart

If you've been working with PHP for a while, you already know that the language makes dynamic image generation very simple: the GD extension and a few lines of PHP code are all you need to create a JPEG, GIF or PNG image from scratch. However, while this works remarkably well for simple tasks, it can become tedious and complicated if you need to generate more complex images, such as graphs and charts, at run-time.