I've been studying the bagpipes for a couple of months, now. I wanted to be able to continue practicing while on vacation, but was worried about how much noise the chanter would make. Look around the web and you'll see many websites explaining that one doesn't learn on the full pipes, one uses a practice chanter, which is significantly quieter. My family will tell you that, while it may be significantly quieter than the great highland bagpipes (abbreviated as GHB all over the place), it's...

Something I discovered recently that bears writing down: you can define all the handlers and actions you want in your code but if you don't actually list them in your android manifest, then you can't dispatch intents to them.

I had written the main Action of the chicken book to list all the entries and that worked, and I'd made a second Action to display and edit a single entry and that worked. Then, since it was perfect, I fixed it and in the fixing I removed the reference to the...

From time to time, and increasingly frequently at this time of year, my dear wife has to send out emails to big segments of her company's customer base. That's her job, after all. However, for reasons that are outside the scope of this blog, the list of customers doesn't always have an email for each customer and, for various other reasons, the email addresses are not always well-formed. It takes her several hours each time to go through the list and manually screen them all. I like to see...

I keep thinking about the Salamander Simulation Engine (SSE) -- a codebase I worked on in the mid-nineties -- and thinking what a cool tool it was. For that matter, it likely still is, although the company has changed name and direction a bit since 1997. Now it's DecisionPower and they're all about market simulation. Back then they (we) were Salamander Interactive and it was about this general purpose simulation engine.

The SSE was a way of...