Grammerjack

Now that the Android Native Development Kit has been released, I was finally able to publish the sources and binary to my Android Terminal Emulator . It's a fairly plain Digital Equipment Corporation VT-100 terminal emulator, with some features from newer terminals (like colors.) This is my first application in the Android Market. There are at least 10 other terminal emulators in the market; we'll see how this one is received. A bit of history: This was my first Android application. I wrote it for the original "Sooner" Android devices, and have kept it updated for the successive generations of devices. It requires native code because there's no public Android Java APIs for dealing with PTYs. A bit of ancient history: I wrote two terminal emulators for the Atari 800 back in the day: Chameleon, in 6502 assembly, and a version of Kermit in the excellent "Action!" programming language. Kermit was one of my first "open source" programs. If you poke ...

Yesterday I wrote a web scraper. A web scraper is a program that crawls over a set of web pages, following links and collecting data. Another name for this kind of program is a "spider", because it "crawls" the web. In the past I've written scrapers in Java and F# , with good results. But yesterday, when I wanted to write a new scraper, I though I'd try using a dynamically-typed language instead. What's a dynamically-typed language you ask? Well, computer languages can generally be divided into two camps, depending on whether they make you declare the type of data that can be stored in a variable or not. Declaring the type up front can make the program run faster, but it's more work for the developer. Java and F#, the languages I previously used to write a web scraper, are statically typed languages, although F# uses type inference so you don't actually have to declare types very often -- the computer figures it out for you. In order to scrape ...