Programming on Evan Hoffman

Displaying currently-playing iTunes track in the Mac menu bar

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 14:48:42 +0000

In an attempt to teach myself Objective C, and because I couldn’t find anything that did what I wanted, I wrote a little utility to display the currently-playing iTunes track in the Mac taskbar. Originally I had it display the full track name right in the taskbar but it was too much text for such a small space (especially on a 1440x900 screen), so now you click a little musical note and it shows you the info in a menu.

Benchmarking DNS servers with Java

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 12:33:28 +0000

I’m currently in the process of moving our DNS over to another provider and I was curious as to whether the old or new provider offers faster lookups. dig shows query times, but I didn’t want to just run that over and over. I decided to write something to do this, in Java since I like Java. I found this post, which has the meat of the work done already. I also read some of Sun’s JNDI/DNS lookup info, which was pretty dense. All I want to do is specify the name server’s IP and do the lookup. I don’t even really care about the result, just how long the query takes.

Teaching myself node.js: Part 3

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 17:39:59 +0000

Notes on MongoDB’s ObjectID vs sequential identifiers.

JavaScript regex for stripping leading & trailing whitespaces

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 00:09:51 +0000

str.replace(/^(\s*)((\S+\s*?))(\s)$/,"$2");

Teaching myself node.js: Part 1

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 00:50:59 +0000

In which I try to learn node.js by building a Quora-like site (since it seems everyone is building a blog).

Java Code: searching a Binary Search Tree for the largest value strictly less than X

Sun, 09 May 2010 13:43:17 +0000

Java code for creating and searching a Binary Search Tree of any element implementing the Comparable interface.

House

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 23:23:26 +0000

Guess we’re moving.

I’m reading about iPhone development. Doesn’t look terrible.