All posts filed under: Software Engineering

Crunch-time

I didn’t talk to my girlfriend very much lately. I didn’t read many blogs. I didn’t watch any movies. I didn’t breathe much fresh air. I didn’t use my PC for anything more than listening to music or fetching mails. I didn’t sleep much more than four hours the last two weeks or so. I neither wrote a single line of code for DVW nor attended the last sechsta sinn team meeting. I have a new game on my desk right next to me but I didn’t even bother to install it yet. I get asked whether I’m sick because I look like a zombie when I creep around the office in the morning at noon. I currently drink so many energy drinks that my heart beats heavily when I finally try to get some sleep (so eventually I don’t get any). I’m sitting here with the MacBook Pro on my lap, big headphones with music on my head and two separate headphones in my ears, one connected to the MacBook and one to an …

iPhone NDA dropped

Apple has dropped the iPhone NDA for released software. I guess now I need to release something really quick in order to be able to discuss iPhone development in detail and publically, right? So, you get what that actually means? It seems now that they cannot protect their stuff as much as they wanted, they at least want to make sure that people discussing the stuff have paid for the developer program first. As it seems, “released iPhone software” refers to the SDK itself, not released products in the AppStore. At least, this is what everyone else seems to think.

digitalbreed framework

I am getting dumb of writing the same code over and over, so I am finally in the process of setting up a C++ framework with core functionality I use in almost every project: macros (e.g. assertions), helper functions (e.g. pattern matching), serialization, virtual file system, XML support,… Some of the stuff is extracted from what I wrote for DVW, the VFS and XML stuff in particular. I am thinking about writing more articles on this, like I did for the serialization part. Let me know whether you’d like to read more so that I can estimate whether it’s worth the effort. I would start with the VFS and head over to XML support.

A bugfixed Bookmarks Displayer Widget

I upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1 today due to some major security issues (German link) and was reminded that one of my widgets was not working correctly. Nathan Oliphant wrote this widget to display bookmarks in the sort order of the users choosing. Unfortunately, it had two minor bugs which 1. caused changes not to be made persistent correctly with recent WordPress versions and 2. broke proper sort order selection. I fixed those bugs and added optional support for Ozh’s Click Counter plugin. Again, here’s a direct link for your convenience, tested with WordPress 2.5.1: Nathan Oliphants Bookmarks Displayer Widget (rename to .PHP after downloading)

MyBB Registration eMail Check

Today, I wrote a simple MyBB plugin, Registration eMail Check (RMC). The plugin first verifies whether the email has a valid format, then compares the email host with a number of hosts which were explicitly disabled by the administrator (the plugin comes with a decent list of well-known one-time address providers), and finally tries to communicate with the corresponding mail server in order to verify whether the address actually exists. I wrote the plugin for two reasons: First, because I wanted to prevent automated bot registration with non-existing email addresses. When I look through lists of users waiting for activation I find an ever growing amount of accounts which were obviously generated automatically, using non-existing email addresses. Second, because I don’t want people to use anonymous one-time email addresses when registering in forums where a certain mutual trust is mandatory. Here’s version 1.0 for your convenience, tested with MyBB version 1.2.12: RMC – Registration eMail Check 1.0 for MyBB The source code is now available on GitHub.