Sometimes, when debugging a GWT application, one needs to attach the magical gwt.codesvr= incantation to a URL manually, for whatever reason. It’s easy enough to do this by hand but even easier to use a bookmarklet. Create a bookmark from that there link and, when you click it later, it will add the GWT development mode parameters to the currently open URL. If you need to use a development mode server other than localhost you’ll need to edit the bookmarklet accordingly – it may be easier to do so using the un-collapsed script: Read more

I switched the blog to a different back end and a slightly different style. I’m using Hobix (again, I used it back in… 2007?) and have made a bunch of modifications to support what I want to do. I have a fork of (a fork of) the original Hobix project at Github. I also have a bunch of local modifications (for things like Markdown support and permalink preservation – real exciting, I know). Read more

The (almost) always entertaining Daily WTF has an article today about my favorite pair of standard C functions, setjmp and longjmp: If goto is considered harmful, then longjmp() should definitely be considered dangerous. As in, thermo-freakin-nuclear bomb dangerous. Fortunately, its complexity and frequency of use seem to be on par with that of a nuke, and most C developers have not brought it in their everyday. Most.

From the strtok/strtok_r man page: BUGS</p> <p>Avoid using these functions.

Hacked to little bits; this piece of code fits right in. Fix it later. Right.

At work I’m doing some old school C programming, which made me think of the OS class I took at BU. Just for shits and giggles I looked up the man page for longjmp(). The best part of the page, by far, is the NOTES section: longjmp() and siglongjmp() make programs hard to understand and maintain. If possible an alternative should be used. Understatement of the millennium (and the last millennium too). Read more