Category Archives: Uncategorized

I wanted to have a fiddle writing code for the BBC Micro:bit in C, where I’d have access to the full potential of the device, most importantly the Bluetooth functionality. Creating your own programs offline requires a non-trivial setup, regardless … Continue reading →

Public Key Cryptography is a hugely important invention.  It underpins the security (specifically the confidentiality) of most online commerce transactions.  Whilst it’s a complex subject and the subject of highly intricate and complex research to make the Internet a secure place to do business, … Continue reading →

When serialising data to a Comma Separated Values (CSV) file, it’s important that field values that contain reserved characters are escaped correctly.  For example, if a value contains a unescaped comma, then this value will be incorrectly interpreted as two … Continue reading →

The Apache Commons Command Line Interface (CLI), is a handy little toolkit for handling command line arguments.  Java programs, as with almost all other programs running on an OS that supports a CLI, permits passing of arguments from the user … Continue reading →

Background This, and subsequent, entries describe the process I went through with moving an Eclipse Java project from Eclipse-managed, hard-coded, downloaded dependent jars to using Apache Ant and Ivy.  It will hopefully serve as a good tutorial for those attempting … Continue reading →

[Updated: 11/9 to include a note about Pensions] I was recently asked for my opinion on whether I thought that contracting was a good idea.  My immediate, reactive thought was to answer with an emphatic “Yes!”, but I then started … Continue reading →

Sliding Block Puzzle was originally written to do all initialisation within the Loaded event handler for a page.  However, this yields some strange and unwanted behaviour sometimes, such as: 1. Pages don’t initialise properly when returning to them deactivation. 2. … Continue reading →

Coding in XAML is quite ridiculously easy on the face of it, there’s masses of tutorials, samples, guides and step-by-step instructions for building simple applications that solve problems in a pretty elegantly presented UI. However like a marathon runner, just … Continue reading →