Consider the dual

Now at Wordpress

2008-12-28T18:59:00.001Z

I decided to move my blog to Wordpress.

s/constrained.org/confiction.org/g

2008-08-16T16:17:00.021+01:00

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!

Pure Java/J2ME Compression

2008-07-29T17:59:00.002+01:00

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

Cybersyn

2008-07-28T14:48:00.000+01:00

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.

A lovely accident

2008-07-23T09:54:00.000+01:00

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

Lightweight Encryption for Java/J2ME

2008-07-21T00:39:00.000+01:00

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.

Reluctant blogging

2008-07-17T11:40:00.000+01:00

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?