[Poems] Romantic Haikus

She leans toward his lips,
until she senses his breath.
“Did you just eat fish?”

Brisk winter weather.
Light flakes dust her hair; she says
“Sorry, I’ve dandruff.”

Introducing mkwords, an Android app for solving anagrams

Yesterday, I published mkwords (pronounced: "make words"), a rather simple android app for solving anagrams. That means that you give it a series of letters and it searches a dictionary for any words that can be spelled with only those letters. You could potentially use it to cheat in word games like Scrabble, Words with Friends, or Bananagrams. Or, if you just get a thrill by finding anagrams of words, that's fine too. I'll probably add an ad-free paid version soon.

You can get the app on the Google Play Store.

Mixing glib's memory allocations with clang's code analysis

Glib provides wrappers around common memory allocation functions like malloc and free. Glib's functions have several benefits; there's no undefined behavior when you g_malloc(0), and they make it much easier to swap out different implementations of malloc.

The wrappers do have one large downside - they make it difficult for automated tools to tell what's going on in the program. In particular, I wanted to use clang's code analyzer, scan-build, to find memory leaks in the GIMP.

Nightly Builds of The GIMP

I've begun doing nightly builds of The GIMP for Windows.

Anyone interested in how I set up my build environment can find the jhbuild files on github. The builds are cross compiled using the mingw-w64 packages from the debian repositories. Hopefully, I'll get around to writing up instructions on how to set up a build environment soon.

The builds themselves can be found here.

Creating 7zip Self Extracting Archives

7zip has the ability to create "self extracting archives". This means that you can create an executable that contains both an archive and the code to extract your files, so the target user doesn't need any additional software installed on their machine to open your files.

Creating a Three Column Layout with CSS

Getting CSS to layout your pages the way you want it to can be tricky. This is how I sometimes create a three column layout for my sites.