Archive for the ‘Computer’ Category

More Boring Blog Statistics

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

As a follow-up from my last post here are some more visitor statistics courtesy of Google Analytics. These are for sandfly.net.nz as a whole, not just this blog. Last year I got nearly 18000 visits from over 4000 cities (not all appear on this map) in 128 countries. The top 5 ...

200th Post – State of the Blog

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010

Yes, the title is correct - this is the 200th post on Life of Andrew. I started this blog almost exactly 4 years ago as a way of practising my writing. At the time I thought that 1 post a week was a good target, I guess I have fallen ...

Robots, Robots, Robots

Monday, June 14th, 2010

I really like what people have been doing with robotics in the last few years. Now that powerful CPUs are cheap and wireless communications ubiquitous, whole new areas are opening up for hobbyists to explore. Sure, someday those robots will undoubtedly rise up and destroy humanity, but until then why ...

Welcome to the 151st Ranked Blog in NZ

Sunday, June 6th, 2010

You find the most interesting things trawling through the "Incoming Links" section of the WordPress Admin Dashboard. According to this page at halfdone (I'd never heard of them either), Life of Andrew is the 151st in their list of NZ blogs that are "about something". I am not entirely ...

TV Theme Quiz II : The Themes Strike Back

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

It was bound to happen. People seemed to enjoy the first TV Theme Quiz so I fired up Audacity and created another 30 seconds of familiar ditties. Things were solved pretty quickly last time so I tried to make this one just a smidgeon harder - we will see if ...

A Better Boost Book

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

Boost is a excellent resource for C++ programming, but suffers from inconsistent documentation and a daunting array of sub-projects. Trying to make sense of it all is a fairly serious undertaking. I tried to get my head around it by writing my occasional series of boost blog posts, but now ...

The HTML5 audio tag

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

I have been mucking around with the

Using Exceptions in C++

Monday, March 8th, 2010

C++ is big - it has been said that any given programmer only ever uses about 40% of the language's features. The trouble is that it is a different 40% for each person. Exceptions are a great example of this, some people swear by them while many coding standards specifically ...

Mobile Safari Does Not Support Flash (and Never Will)

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Listening to some people, the lack of Flash on the iPhone/iPad is some sort of crime against nature. There are numerous complaints about it online - all bemoaning the inability to play their favourite Flash games or view video. These complaints miss the point entirely - there are two simple ...

UIButton.titleLabel is not as useful as it looks

Saturday, February 13th, 2010

I have been doing some iPhone development lately. Nothing too amazing, just some test apps to get a feel for the system. Now, some people will tell you that Cocoa Touch is an API sent from God and frankly it is pretty good (especially given what passes for UI on ...

The C++ Boost Libraries Part 6 – boost::any

Sunday, December 6th, 2009

In C++ if you have a variable that you say is of type "Person" (for instance), you can be fairly certain (more or less) that it always actually contains a Person (or perhaps a subclass of Person. If you have a container of Persons, then you know (more or less) ...

Python and The Very Slow Server

Saturday, November 28th, 2009

I don't usually do a lot of Python programming, but I always enjoy it when the opportunity arises. Python is in no way a "clean" language, it has all sorts of warts and limitations that mean that it tends to not get used for big projects. Despite this (or maybe ...

Pacman

Friday, November 27th, 2009

Remember kids - winners don't do drugs. No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Catan – The First Island

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009

I love the Settlers of Catan board game, so when an iPod version appeared in the App Store for $6.49 I grabbed it straight away. Dubbed "Catan - The First Island", the app includes everything in the core game, I assume more games based on the Catan expansions are on ...

How to change the dictionary in MacOSX

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

I love MacOSX, and one of the best features is the almost ubiquitous built-in dictionary. So it is surprising that I after 3 years I have only just now discovered how to switch the dictionary from the default American English to British spellings. For some reason this is not part ...