Embedding Jasper

I’ve always had a fascination with compilers.  As a Java geek, I’m also quite interested in the JVM.  In order to learn a little more about both, and as a way to contribute to the open source world, I decided to implement a compiler for BASIC.   So, jvmBasic consumes BASIC code and emits .class…

If you haven’t read this book, I highly recommend it.  I discovered it in high school and finally purchased my first copy at the now-gone Duthie Books in Kitsilano.  Without going into the details of the book, the author uses a simple Peano arithmetic called Typographical Number Theory  (TNT) to illustrate some of his points. An example…

A couple projects I’ve been working on have a need for a REPL style console.  I had written a simple framework for creating REPL’s, which is open-sourced here.  

Back in the day, Paradox was a pretty amazing database.  I recently had a reason to read some Paradox files for a friend, who had a client with a Paradox database.  They needed their data out of the database to insert into something more modern. Googling for the file format of a Paradox DB didn’t…

I’ve recently been quite interested in Graph languages, not for Graph Databases, but for representing information, in code that is essentially “things” and “relationships”. For example, one perspective on Organizations is that they are simply representable as people, systems and the information that flows between them. Those three building blocks are, in theory, enough to…

I recently found myself in a situation where mission-critical software was suffering from performance problems due to relying on a remote API which was both slow (as slow as 11sec / transaction), and unreliable.   In this case, it turned out that there were multiple applications accessing this API, and every individual application was affected….