Codehenge - Who built it, and why? A blog about software, technology, and more

Book Review: Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World's Most Wanted Hacker by Kevin Mitnick

Here is my early review of "Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker", the autobiography of Kevin Mitnick, one of the most notorious hackers in history. »

Android Development Tutorial: ProgressBar Example

The Android ProgressBar is a useful UI component that most developers will quickly find need of. Displaying progress, even an indeterminate "loading" indicator, provides crucial feedback to a user, eliminating frustration and confusion while your app is churning away in the background. Today I'll demonstrate using an indeterminate ProgressBar within a ListView while loading web content. I'll be modifying the TweetView project from my previous post. »

Android Development Tutorial: Asynchronous Lazy Loading and Caching of ListView Images

In my last post I created a simple Android Twitter feed reader based on the Twitter Search API, demonstrating an application of custom ListView layouts and integration of internet data sources. Today I'll refactor the Twitter example to add asynchronous lazy loading and caching of images (Twitter profile images, in our case). »

Website Update

Just a quick note - I am in the process of updating the site based on reader feedback and some layout issues i've been having. The new layout should limit scrolling within code blocks, and hopefully provide a better reader experience.

I'm interested in any feedback readers have on these changes, and thanks for your patience as I worked to fix these issues!

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Android Development Tutorial - A Simple Twitter Feed Reader

Last week I demonstrated designing and implementing customized layouts for Android ListView items, including some simple example code. Today i'll expand on that code to make something a little closer to an actual app: a Twitter feed reader for Android. I'll use this exercise to illustrate some new tools and concepts in the process such as working with JSON data and the Android BitmapFactory. »

Customizing Android ListView Item Layout

Today I'm going to go step by step through an example of using a ListView, and customizing the visual layout of items within. »

Getting Started With node.js and socket.io - Part 2

In my last post I went through installation and setup of some great new tools: node.js and socket.io. Now that we have node and socket.io installed, its time to play around a bit to understand how to use these new toys. In this post I'll be writing a simple http server and some client-side html/javascript to go with it. »

Getting Started With node.js and socket.io - Part 1

Like many developers out there, I've been interested in the potential of real-time, high-throughput client/server communication in web apps using node.js for some time. In this post I'll go through the installation of node.js and socket.io on OSX, then in my next post we'll make a simple test app from scratch (which helps me to learn far better than just running a pre-made example). »

Don't Take Your Users To School

In 2003, I started my journey towards a PhD. My research focused on medical image analysis, putting my software engineering skills to use in the field of Biomedical Engineering. I began working on the problem of 3D image segmentation... »

I don't wanna come back down from this cloud...

I’ve never heard the word “cloud” used so much in my life. Indeed, cloud has been a buzzword for a few years now, describing any number of disparate technologies, architectures, and ideologies. But the reality of this next phase in computing, and what this “cloud” will actually become, is coming into focus. »