Sunday 28 December 2008

Now at Wordpress

I decided to move my blog to Wordpress.

Saturday 16 August 2008

s/constrained.org/confiction.org/g

Back when the earth was still young (2004), I created a community website for authors of constrained literature called constrained.org. The site attracted a small, but dedicated group of writers who produced sometimes brilliant and always ingenious responses to our crop of devious challenges. Sadly as the oceans were still cooling (2006) we lost constrained.org to grubby-fingered domain squatters.

There was silence....

But in strange aeons even death may die. And so I'm delighted to announce that constrained.org is revivified, rebranded to confiction.org and raring to go. Come and join us!

Tuesday 29 July 2008

Pure Java/J2ME Compression

Further releasing bits of code I have lying around: here's Compressor.java, a lightweight (J2ME-friendly) range encoding compression algorithm in 4k of bytecode. Released under the LGPL.

Meanwhile on Wikipedia: Charlieplexing, Monte Cazzaza, RE/Search

Monday 28 July 2008

Cybersyn

A Gernsback Continuum moment:


Cybersyn was, oh God, a cybernetic command and control center for the Chilean managed economy of the 70s. I'm not sure what's left of the thing itself but there is a nice website memorialising it.

Wednesday 23 July 2008

A lovely accident

While mucking around with odd planar image formats for the slitscan project, I stumbled across this lovely accident.

Monday 21 July 2008

Lightweight Encryption for Java/J2ME

I've got a few useful nuggets of code lying around that I've been meaning to open-source for quite a while. One of them is a Java/J2ME implementation of David Wheeler and Roger Needham's Tiny Encryption Algorithm. Today I tidied it up and stuck it online. It's handy if you want a robust cipher in less than 2k of bytecode. You can snag it here.

Thursday 17 July 2008

Reluctant blogging

Hello world. My name's Joe Halliwell. I am a reluctant blogger.

I tried it once in 1996. I spent a week or so writing a blog "engine" and designing the layout. Then, three posts in quick succession. Then, nothing.

Omen absit.

I met a guy the other day who runs three blogs. Once a month he sits down and writes 30 days worth of posts for each of them. Often he'll write an essay then divide it into chunks. He is a machine. I admire that in a person.

Still, I won't be trying to emulate that prodigious output. I would do anything for PageRank but I won't do that. Like you care. Let's just see how this goes, shall we?