Developing on Android

June 30, 2009 at 8:43 pm | In Programming | 2 Comments

I intend to buy an Android phone. It’s probably going to be the HTC Hero mainly because it’s almost available where I live and it also comes without a simlock, unlike for example the HTC Magic which is exclusive for Vodafone. Next I plan to develop some übercool applications but in the meantime I’ll start with porting a very old game I did more than a decade ago: it was called Groundhog. A screenshot:

Groundhog screenshot

Groundhog screenshot

So stay tuned for a Groundhog coming to your mobile…

GIMP# with Mono 2.4 and GIMP 2.6

June 8, 2009 at 1:38 pm | In C#, GIMP | 3 Comments

I finally took some time to get GIMP# up and running with the latest Mono and GIMP releases. Not sure how I’m going to continue from here, but I will probably first update the code with the latest C# language features. Also since GIMP 2.6 has been out now for more than half a year, I will only support this version. Stay tuned for a maintenance release soon!

Experiments with the Google Chart API

March 26, 2009 at 9:05 pm | In Programming | Leave a Comment

In 25 years of programming I blogged about the lines of code I have written in several programming languages. I am experimenting with the Google Chart API and created a graphical overview of my personal top 7. Result:

Top 10

The url to generate the pie chart:


http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=p3&chtt=Top+7&chts=0000ff,32&chd=t:100,70,20,20,5,5,2,3&chs=650x250&chl=C%20(100000)|C%23%20(70000)|Java%20(20000)|C%2B%2B%20(20000)|Pascal%20(5000)|PV~Wave%20(5000)|Basic%20(2000)|Other%20(3400)|

Continue reading Experiments with the Google Chart API…

Hacking JIRA with Ruby

March 19, 2009 at 10:13 pm | In Programming | 3 Comments

I have been reading a lot over the last couple of months. Great books like “The World is Flat 3.0″, “Dreaming in Code”, “My Job went to India”, “The five dysfunctions of a team”, “Clean Code” and quite a few more. However I started to realize that although reading is fun, it tends to keep me in my comfort zone. I should really practice writing. People remember great writers. You hardly ever hear people saying “he was such a great reader” about a person that died hundred years ago.

So I just put down here what I’m doing at the moment. Lately I started to automate some things like writing progress reports for customers. Now please don’t stop reading at the word “progress report”. It might become a bit more interesting Continue reading Hacking JIRA with Ruby…

Writing GIMP plug-ins in Object Pascal

October 23, 2008 at 2:46 pm | In GIMP, Programming | 5 Comments

I slowly picked up GIMP# development again. To get my brain in the right mode I added a plug-in in yet another .NET language: Oxygene which is a kind of Object Pascal. From what I’ve seen it is a pretty decent language although I never understood why people would like to type 10 characters (”begin;” and “end;”) instead of 2 curly braces just to open and close a block ;)

For those interested: currently I run Mandriva 2009 with VirtualBox 2.0.2 on my loyal MacBook Pro for development. The fancy IDE I use is called Emacs.

IronRuby and the Fan Programming Language will probably be my next targets.

The end is nigh

June 26, 2008 at 9:33 pm | In Ramblings | Leave a Comment

Just recently is finished “Svartir Englar” by Ævar Örn Jósepsson (I read the Dutch version) although I was pretty bored after the first twenty pages. After finishing the book I realized that I should have stopped after those initial pages since this has just been a waste of my time. The question then came up how many books I was going to read about the end of my life.  In his book “Metamagical Themas” Douglas Hofstadter learns us that it is actually pretty straightforward to come up with answers to questions such as “how many books are there in all the libraries in the world”. In my case it is far more easy: I will probably live for another 40 years and I finish 1 book per week on the average. So I still have about 2000 books to go. Might be a bit more or a bit less, but for sure I’m not going to finish 10.000 books.

How much shelf space will those books take? Let’s suppose those books are 2 cm thick on the average. That makes a total of 40 meter shelf space I need. In my house I have a wall that is 5 meter long. If I can put 8 shelves against that wall it will be completely covered with books. So my whole life that I have in front of me only fills one single wall.

Maybe I should start selecting my books a bit more critical ;)

GIMP# 0.15 released

May 12, 2008 at 9:05 am | In C#, GIMP | 23 Comments

Finally a new GIMP# release. Major highlights for this release:

  • Many improvements to get the Photoshop actions plug-in usable: 10 copyright-free actions are now verified and can be downloaded from SourceForge
  • An abandoned plug-in to load GEM image files was ported
  • The Russian translation was updated (thanks Alexandre!)

The next GIMP# version will be released as soon as I’ve got 20 correctly working Photoshop action files.

25 years of programming

March 8, 2008 at 11:01 am | In Programming, Ramblings | 6 Comments

I started programming in 1983 on a Sharp PC-1251 with an amazing 3486 bytes RAM. It had a Basic interpreter and we had to use it for a Calculus course at the university.

Sharp PC-1251

So that’s 25 years ago. That made me suddenly wonder how much code in different programming languages I have written in all those years. A completely useless question of course, but fun nevertheless. I don’t have all the code available anymore so I have to estimate some numbers from memory. The numbers I present include comment and blank lines.

The list:

  1. C: 100.000
  2. C#: 70.000
  3. Java: 20.000
  4. C++: 20.000
  5. Pascal: 5.000
  6. PV~Wave: 5.000
  7. Basic: 2.000
  8. Matlab: 1.000
  9. Lisp/Scheme: 1.000
  10. Assembly: 1.000
  11. Fortran: 200
  12. Perl: 100
  13. Python: 20
  14. Boo: 20
  15. Nemerle: 20
  16. F#: 20
  17. Ruby: 10

This totals 225k lines of code in 25 years.In other words, about 10k LOC’s per year, or 30 lines per day. Other interesting questions that could be asked:

  • how much of this code is still in use
  • how much of this code is forever lost
  • how much of this code is still archived somewhere on a company network
  • how much code would this have been if it all had been written using language xyz
  • how many bugs did I introduce over the last 25 years ;)

1000+ GIMP# downloads this month

February 25, 2008 at 7:36 pm | In GIMP | 4 Comments

A new milestone: in February the number of monthly GIMP# downloads surpassed 1000 for the first time. A big thanks goes to Ivo Rytir for the win32 installer and the patches he has submitted. His installer accounts for 60 % of the downloads. I happen to be in his hometown Toronto for the Agile 2008 conference this year and I will certainly buy him his favorite beer: Pilsner Urguell. Cheers Ivo!

Pilsner Urguell

GIMP# 0.14 released

January 4, 2008 at 2:00 pm | In GIMP, Programming | 34 Comments

A new release of GIMP# is available. New in release 0.14 are:

  • Nemerle sample added
  • Boo sample added
  • Visual Basic sample added (I know.. don’t ask ;) )
  • F# sample added
  • Ported abandoned Sky plug-in (part of PhyModMedia plug-ins)
  • GIMP# now uses C# 3.0 features for cleaner code

Have fun.

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