The WebSocket protocol has applications beyond plain vanilla web development.  I will explain how the protocol works, how to implement your own server and share some insights I had along the way. Before we get down and dirty, I will explain what I’ve been doing with it.At this point I expect many of you are saying “I’m not working on a web game this doesn’t seem relevant to me.” Well, neither am I. I embed a WebSocket server into my game engine and with a local web application use the WebSocket protocol as a medium to control, configure and monitor my game...

One of my New Years resolutions was to finally learn the iOS SDK and build a 'real' application.I am happy to report that progress is going really well and wanted to share something that I have noticed about iOS programming.It only looks scary... it's not. It's actually very easy.Now, I am not building Mail, Angry Birds or Photosynth or anything, but the core concepts of the SDK are not that bad once you spend some time learning delegation. If you don't understand delegation, iOS programming is VERY hard. Even if you have GUI experience and aren't coming from the web, it's going to be tough...

I've always considered myself a bit of a software junkie. Nothing excites me more than a great piece of new software.Some of my best childhood memories are our trips to Grandma's house, where I'd have access to a computer with a dial-up connection that I'd use to obtain freeware and shareware.I'd bring 4 or 5 floppies with me and try to cram all the games, waveform editors, and utilities that I could sneaker-net home.Luckily today, excellent software written with passion oozes out of the app ecosystem. OS X and the App Store really fuel an economy of software built for humans by people tha...

When working with PHP, it is very useful to have a “toolbox” of handy functions and code snippets that can save lots of time when needed. Today, I’m going to show you 10 super useful code snippets that you probably never heard of. Text messaging with PHP using the TextMagic APIIf for some reason, you need to send text messages to your clients cell phones, you should definitely have a look to TextMagic. They provide an easy API which allow you to send SMS to cell phones. Please note that the TextMagic service isn’t free.The example below shows how easy it is to ...

Programming is a lot like eating.Tonight I was hungry. I wasn't at home. I couldn't go to the kitchen for a snack. I looked around and saw only McDonald's across the street.Then I was struck with the same dilemma that I face whenever I leave the comfort of my own home for any decent spread of time: Do I eat crappy food now and satisfy that hunger? Or do I stay hungry for a little longer and eat a healthy meal back at home?As I pondered this dilemma I couldn't help but notice how much it relates to code quality. But more about food first.I can only speak for myself, but I do not consider a McDo...

WE who love the Internet love the fact that so many people contribute to it. It’s hard to believe that skeptics once worried about whether anyone would have anything worthwhile to say online. There is, however, an outdated brand of digital orthodoxy that ought to be retired. In this worldview, the Internet is a never-ending battle of good guys who love freedom against bad guys like old-fashioned Hollywood media moguls. The bad guys want to strengthen copyright law, and make it impossible to post anonymously copied videos and stories. The proposed Stop Online Piracy Act, or...

Lisp programmers should stop reading right now because they'll likely suffer severe injury of the jaw muscles as they laugh themselves silly at how hard it is to do some things in C. The C language has a pre-processor (typically called cpp) that is both infuriating and powerful. How powerful is usually best described as 'just too little' and it has happened more than once that I found myself almost - but not quite - able to do what I wanted to do.The frustration can run very deep at times like these. Recently I had another battle with the C pre-processor to write a set of macros to accompl...

Following my article A String is not an Error, I want to bring attention to an issue that similarly applies to JavaScript in general, but has special relevance in the Node.JS environment.The problem boils down to the usage of {} as a data-structure where the keys are supplied by untrusted user input, and the mechanisms that are normally used to assert whether a key exists.Consider the example of a simple blog created with Express. We decide to store blog posts in memory in a {}, indexed by the blog post slug. For example, this blog post would be posts['an-object-is-not-a-hash'].We start writin...