Coffee scoop and hillbilly

By Jim, on January 31st, 2011%

A few new carvings recently. Debra wanted a new coffee scoop, so I made her two of them.

The scoop is carved from basswood, and finished with something called “butcher block conditioner”–a mix of beeswax and food-grade mineral oil. I figured there wasn’t much sense in using an exotic wood for the scoop, as it’s . . . → Read More: Coffee scoop and hillbilly

Comments are closed   Carving

Potential ambiguity is a mess

By Jim, on January 26th, 2011%

The idea behind data format standards is to ensure that disparate tools can communicate using a common “language.” When the standard includes potential ambiguity, things get messy.

A case in point is JSON (Javascript Object Notation). The standard for escaping characters in strings looks like this:

In English, that says that the only characters that . . . → Read More: Potential ambiguity is a mess

Comments are closed   Programming

Walnut dolphin

By Jim, on January 15th, 2011%

Somebody gave me a piece of black walnut that had a dolphin outline drawn on it. She didn’t want to work with the walnut, which is somewhat harder than most carvers are comfortable with. I cut out the pattern at the beginning of December, but didn’t get around to carving on it until last week.

. . . → Read More: Walnut dolphin

One comment - (Comments are closed)   Carving

HttpListenerContext and Url-encoded query parameters

By Jim, on January 12th, 2011%

The HttpListener class in .NET lets you create a lightweight HTTP server without having to go through all the rigmarole¹ of installing and managing IIS. It’s incredibly easy to get a simple HTTP server up and working with HttpListener

But when it comes to handling query parameters, things break in a very strange way. The . . . → Read More: HttpListenerContext and Url-encoded query parameters

One comment - (Comments are closed)   Programming

New dog

By Jim, on January 11th, 2011%

This dog is carved from a piece of wood that I picked up from the discard pile at the local Woodcraft store. I thought it was red oak, but it might instead be padauk. Or something else. Whatever it is, it was a pleasure to carve. A little on the hard side, but no match . . . → Read More: New dog

Comments are closed   Carving

More fun with regular expressions

By Jim, on January 6th, 2011%

I’ve said before that regular expressions make my brain hurt. I’ve also been rather outspoken on a number of occasions regarding the misuse of regular expressions. All too often, programmers faced with any kind of parsing problem immediately reach for their regex hammer and then spend an inordinate amount of time trying to use it . . . → Read More: More fun with regular expressions

Comments are closed   Computers, Programming