As sort of follow-up-in-spirit to my older post I decided to share a really straight forward way to use Objective-C to build GTK+ applications. Objective-what? Objective-C is an improvement to the iconic C programming language that remains backwards compatible while adding many new and interesting features. Chief among these additions is syntax for real objects (and thus object-oriented programming). Popularized by NeXT and eventually Apple, Objective-C is most commonly seen in development for Apple OSX and iOS based platforms.

Recently I have been messing around with Django, a very cool Python powered web framework that makes it very easy to create websites quickly. Like similar frameworks (i.e. Ruby on Rails, CakePHP, etc.) Django excels at doing most of the heavy lifting for you. What is most jarring at first, and perhaps the most powerful design choice later on, is that Django has an almost complete separation of server side code from website design.

Last week I attended Ignite Waterloo, a local chapter of the (in?)famous Ignite talk series. In a nutshell Ignite brings together an assortment of speakers who each get time to speak on whatever they are passionate about. The catch is that they get exactly five minutes for their talk; the slides automatically advance every 15 seconds regardless of whether or not they can keep up. Not only was it an informative evening but it was also a very entertaining one as well.

These posts were originally featured on The Linux Experiment One week, three distributions (Day 0) With the recent releases of Linux Mint Debian Edition, Ubuntu and Kubuntu 10.10 I am once again starting to feel that need to hop around and try something new out. …I’ve set myself up a little experiment of sorts: try each distribution for two days each and on the 7th day choose the best from among the three.

Java Web Start is a technology that allows easy deployment of Java based software through a web browser. The advantages of this framework are numerous but one nice thing is that it allows you far more freedom then the completely sandboxed Java applet. In this post I will detail how I converted my Hash Verifier application to run right from the browser. Java Network Launching Protocol (JNLP) The javax.jnlp libraries provide the functionality needed to launch the application from within a web browser.

Both Java and Mono (the open source implementation of C# and .NET) will be receiving pretty big updates this year. These represent two very popular virtual machine based coding platforms that offer portability and a slew of helpful standard libraries. Here are just a handful of the improvements each will see in the coming release. Java SE 7.0 While no tentative release date has been scheduled for Java 7 yet, the team has recently completed milestone 10 of 10.

This post was originally featured on The Linux Experiment Open source software (OSS) is great. It’s powerful, community focused and, lets face it, free. There is not a single day that goes by that I don’t use OSS. Between Firefox, Linux Mint, Thunderbird, Pidgin, Pinta, Deluge, FileZilla and many, many more there is hardly ever an occasion where I find myself in a situation where there isn’t an OSS tool for the job.

Windows?? *GASP!* Sometimes you just have to compile Windows programs from the comfort of your Linux install. This is a relatively simple process that basically requires you to only install the following (Ubuntu) packages: To compile 32-bit programs mingw32 (swap out for gcc-mingw32 if you need 64-bit support) mingw32-binutils mingw32-runtime Additionally for 64-bit programs (*PLEASE SEE NOTE) mingw-w64 gcc-mingw32 Once you have those packages you just need to swap out “gcc” in your normal compile commands with either “i586-mingw32msvc-gcc” (for 32-bit) or “amd64-mingw32msvc-gcc” (for 64-bit).

I stumbled upon a really interesting website tonight run by the guys behind the Debian project. Essentially it is a series of programming language benchmark results, run under different configurations, that not only shows you how each language performed, but also lets you compare and contrast them to one another. So for instance I can compare the performance of C and C++ running on x64 Ubuntu with an Intel Q6600 quad-core.

Back in this previous post I mentioned the possibility of putting up a sort of how-to guide on SWT programming. Well I’ve finally found some time to do so. I will try to make this as step-by-step as possible so that anyone reading this will completely understand what I’m doing. What you’ll need I’m making the following assumptions before starting: That you’ve already installed the Java Development Kit (not just the Java Runtime) That you’ve installed Eclipse.