John's Blog

Introduction One odd thing about Lua when compared to other programming languages is, everything is global by default.

Introduction When I was writing Poddown I needed a thread pool and I needed one that is cross platform.

Introduction There are many open source applications which use threading and are limited to either *nix or Windows because Windows handles threading a bit differently than *nix.

Checking for bits in 1 byte is easy.

At work I use state machines extensively in one of our applications.

Lua doesn’t have true ternary operator but there is a way to mimic the behavior.

Introduction This is something I wrote for PenLight but alas it wasn’t merged.

Introduction I decided to enhance the look of my Tacoma by buying a skid plate.

Introduction When I first started this blog back in 2008 I hosted it myself using an Arch Linux instance with Linode.

Introduction Recently WordPress.com (and WordPress in general) has started pushing the new Gutenberg editor.

Introduction Quicksort is most people’s go to sort function and that’s not a bad thing because it’s a really good general purpose sorting algorithm.

Introduction qsort, heapsort, mergesort, bsearch, and many more search and sort functions all take a compar argument to determine the sorting order of elements in an array.

Introduction The TRD Sport is known to have the hardest ride of any of the Tacoma trims.

This isn’t a huge release but includes a very nice new feature.

Introduction Awhile back I wrote about my experience with the TRD Sport and TRD Pro where I concluded the Sport is better suited for me.

Introduction Quicksort is one of the most common sorting algorithms and one of the most efficient.

Introduction So far, I’ve had three Toyota Tacomas, a 2nd gen and two 3rd gens.

Introduction Some times you need to swap bytes.

After quite some time and a few people asking, I’ve put up a new release of KDocker.

Introduction When dealing with arrays it’s often necessary to keep their elements in sorted order.

Introduction A very popular way to encode binary data is Base64.

Introduction A very common task when working with binary data in C is, converting it to and from Hex.

Introduction Using C functions from C++ is very easy but going the other way isn’t.

Introduction So far we’ve scratched the surface of using JNI when we looked at wrapping a C library and Calling Java from C.

Introduction Obviously, JNI lets you call Java functions and use Java classes in C.

Introduction It can’t be argued that Java is popular and successful.

C has a very large gap when it comes to working with files and directories.

I have been listing to podcasts for a long time and many years ago I wrote a podcast downloader.

For a project I’ve been working on I needed to split a string into it’s component parts.

Comparing strings in C is typically handled with strncmp.

One task that always annoys me when I work with C is building strings. snprintf is all well and good if I know exactly the format I want.

I spent a lot of time writing a number library in Lua just so I could write a hash library in Lua.

When I wrote the fixed width integer part of my Lua number library there were some performance issues.

A while back I wrote lua-nums and said it was working on a project that needed its features.

One area that I’ve always found problematic in Lua is its number type.

One of my biggest pet peeve when it comes to iOS is how the keyboard stays on screen by default.

Most financial apps at some point need to have a user input a monetary amount.

Recently I was faced with an issue where I was writing an app that could call another app using iOS’s URL scheme.

I was recently working on an iOS project and was implementing a login view.

Introduction Using C functions from Objective-C is very easy but going the other way isn’t so easy.

Like many people I prefer to manage my music collection myself instead of leaving it up to something like iTunes.

Introduction Earlier in the year I wrote a Lua implementation of xxd -i (it’s at the bottom under the “Embedding” section).

About An Android app to list services.

Recently Amazon.com introduced s2n as a new TLS implementation.

As of today I’m retiring from being part of Sigil.

This is a very small maintenance release.

Introduction Teavana has a thermometer with a timer that allows you to get your tea to the correct temperature and then steep for the correct amount of time.

Introduction When the aftermarket for the Focus ST just started the first and only manufacturer of after market clutches was Spec.

Introduction A while ago I wrote a template engine in Lua.

I’m pleased to announce that with the help of Dave Butcher KDocker has been updated to use Qt 5!