I’ve been working on adding play-by-email support to my turn-based game server. The first problem I hit was that the PGP signatures on the server’s messages were invalid when I checked them on my email client. This led to lots of debugging and unit tests in my crypto utility. That’s not really wasted effort, butContinue reading “Stupid Email Tricks”
Author Archives: pirateguillermo
Why I Don’t Write Native Apps
Xcode sucks. That’s why. Seriously. This evening I thought, “Hmm, maybe for my next project I’ll see about writing an iOS client for my turn based game server.” So I started looking at a Swift tutorial (the language irritates me so far, but that’s just because so far all the syntactic sugar is solving problemsContinue reading “Why I Don’t Write Native Apps”
Sweet, It Works!
Last post I wrote about wanting to write a text-only Twitter client. So, now I’ve done that. It’s not 100% functional and there are still aspects of JavaFX UI that I’m wrestling with (getting buttons to line up the way I want seems to be way harder than it ought to be), but I reckonContinue reading “Sweet, It Works!”
OAuth, twitter4j, and JavaFX
I’ve started developing a text-only client for Twitter. The impulse came from getting fed up with all the auto-playing promoted tweets that were clogging my timeline. I looked around and found a library to handle all the Twitter API calls and started coding. The example code was all a bit bare-bones, but mostly it wasContinue reading “OAuth, twitter4j, and JavaFX”
Once Again, Most Documentation Sucks
I have been having fun, recently, programming a couple of services that run in Google’s App Engine. One thing they do is maintain some data in that cloud’s version of a database, so one of the important aspects of the services is controlling just who, exactly, is allowed to see or modify the data. I’veContinue reading “Once Again, Most Documentation Sucks”
Buncha Thoughts at Evening
I’m a jerk. Dogs are awesome, and also jerks. Siri is useless for my life. It’s creature dinner time, so I’m getting out the dishes and the food and starting to portion out everybody’s share. Some of the creatures are old and sedentary, some are young and boisterous, and not all are of the sameContinue reading “Buncha Thoughts at Evening”
Credit Where Credit Is Due
It seems to me that I’ve been seeing lots and lots of social media posts which assert that [artist | intellectual] predicted [dystopian future that looks just like one aspect of today’s world] and did it [years ago]. I have to wonder what that’s in aid of. I mean, the second half of the 20th centuryContinue reading “Credit Where Credit Is Due”
Why Crypto?
I know a few people who are concerned about their online privacy, but who don’t have a good handle on what to do about it. There is always some story about some company leaking private data, or some government spying on people, or some “hackers” stealing information for nefarious purposes. So people are worried, butContinue reading “Why Crypto?”
Engage
I got totally burned out on social media by the U.S. election. Rather than textual posts with partisan argumentation (that’s how you spell, “civil discourse,”) Twitter and Facebook were awash in nasty memes. A month later it feels kind of like the morning after a killer party: I’m slowly looking around for cat videos andContinue reading “Engage”
Distortion
Back when Dubya was president, I read Slashdot every day. My wife worked as a journalist and then as a technical writer in the semiconductor industry and she mocked me when I told her about some cool thing I’d seen: either the “news” was like six months old or the story had misrepresented whatever theContinue reading “Distortion”