With this site refresh, I decided I was going to do something that, for the most part, I avoided on my last site incarnation. I’ve installed a battery of statistical gathering tools on my site to see how users are using the various globs of data. It has become eye-opening to me just how much data you actually can gather now-a-days. Some of the tools I have configured on Realjenius.com: (more…)
Archive for September 16th, 2009
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Wednesday, September 16th, 2009Android 1.6 SDK Available
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
The new Android 1.6 SDK (for the upcoming 1.6 platform) is now available. This SDK is based on the logical successor to ‘Cupcake’: Donut.
I am happy to let you know that Android 1.6 SDK is available for download. Android 1.6, which is based on the donut branch from the Android Open Source Project, introduces a number of new features and technologies. With support for CDMA and additional screen sizes, your apps can be deployed on even more mobile networks and devices. You will have access to new technologies, including framework-level support for additional screen resolutions, like QVGA and WVGA, new telephony APIs to support CDMA, gesture APIs, a text-to-speech engine, and the ability to integrate with Quick Search Box. What’s new in Android 1.6 provides a more complete overview of this platform update.
As a user, I’m particularly excited about the quick-search support; however as a prospective Android developer, the CDMA support is a big one. That’s a sure sign to me that Android will start showing up everywhere.
Distilling JRuby: Method Dispatching 101
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
To better understand how JRuby combines the Java world with the Ruby world, I have recently been delving into the source code (available via git), and while the implementation there-in is always bound to evolve and change, it seemed that there would probably be some value in me documenting my journey through the guts of JRuby.
JRuby is a huge beast, so it can be hard to find a place to start – nonetheless, as the joke goes you eat an elephant one bite at a time, so I figured I’d start somewhere at least somewhat familiar.
One of the first areas I picked up was the method dispatch code. This is an area I have seen discussed through a number of blog entries by various JRuby committers; and given the criticality of the code in this area, I knew it was probably a fairly mainstream section of functionality; heavily used by a running JRuby application.
Unfortunately, it is also right in the middle of the implementation, so it’s a bit like starting to eat the elephant right in the middle. Nonetheless, I have made my way through a good bit of it, and learned a lot in the process, so let’s get started.
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