Making MiniZip Easier to Use

Posted on September 8, 2019

Introduction Zip files are one of the most popular archive formats out there, and there are a lot of things you can do with them. While working with the ePub ebook format I spent a lot of time working with zip files. Thankfully, the standards committee for ePub used... Continue reading

Read Write File C Helpers

Posted on August 18, 2019

Introduction Reading and writing files in C isn’t as difficult as it sounds. A few simple loops are all you really need. That said, it’s nice to have a few helper functions ready to drop into a project. Before we write anything we need to think about the choice... Continue reading

Recursive Create Directory in C Revisited

Posted on July 10, 2019

Awhile back I wrote a function to recursively create directories in C. It used a string builder to split the parts and rebuild the path. The way mkdir works is by taking a single directory that does not exist and creates it. If there are multiple path... Continue reading

Unsigned Count Down

Posted on June 2, 2019

Introduction Something that comes up surprisingly often is traversing an array backwards. Maybe you’re emptying a queue. How about my personal favorite, reversing the order of elements. Counting in a for loop is so common you just don’t think about it. But counting backwards can lead to issues... Continue reading

Lua For Loop Scope

Posted on May 20, 2019

Introduction One odd thing about Lua when compared to other programming languages is, everything is global by default. Take this for example: function func_a() q_var = 7 end func_a() print(q_var) Once... Continue reading

Thread Pool in C

Posted on April 12, 2019

Introduction When I was writing Poddown I needed a thread pool and I needed one that is cross platform. Since it’s a lightweight app I didn’t want to include a big third party threading library. So I wrote my own. Why a Thread Pool Creating threads can... Continue reading

Cross Platform Thread Wrapper

Posted on April 5, 2019

Introduction There are many open source applications which use threading and are limited to either *nix or Windows because Windows handles threading a bit differently than *nix. I develop on macOS so pthreads is my go to but using it effectively locks me out of Windows because Windows doesn’t... Continue reading

Looping Through Bytes to Check for Bits

Posted on March 22, 2019

Checking for bits in 1 byte is easy. Checking in 2 bytes is also easy. Checking an odd number of bits in a variable number bytes isn’t so easy. The hard part is dealing with the boundary between bytes where we need to move from one to the next. Lets... Continue reading

Lua-stater a Lua State Machine

Posted on March 4, 2019

At work I use state machines extensively in one of our applications. I’ve found state machines to be very powerful when working with messaging. They are especially useful when combined with event based processing, where an event comes in, the current state can process and move to the next state... Continue reading

Lua Ternary

Posted on February 20, 2019

Lua doesn’t have true ternary operator but there is a way to mimic the behavior. This is one of the biggest issues people who aren’t used to Lua have when reading Lua code. For the most part Lua is simple and straight forward to understand. Assuming a blocky and easy... Continue reading

Lua Case Insenstive Table

Posted on February 12, 2019

Introduction This is something I wrote for PenLight but alas it wasn’t merged. The problem they had is the use if __pairs which isn’t present in Lua 5.1. The project wants to maintain compatibility with 5.1 and LuaJIT which targets 5.1. All the Lua projects I deal... Continue reading

BPF Skid Plate

Posted on February 1, 2019

Introduction I decided to enhance the look of my Tacoma by buying a skid plate. While I do want something that will work as a skid plate, I didn’t want a lump of grey metal. The TRD Pro skid looks good but I’m not a big fan of trying... Continue reading

Moving From WordPress to Jekyll

Posted on January 21, 2019

Introduction When I first started this blog back in 2008 I hosted it myself using an Arch Linux instance with Linode. For the blogging platform I used WordPress MU because it was, and still is, one of the most popular blogging platforms. At that time the MU version... Continue reading

WordPress Gutenberg Editor is Garbage if You Need to Post Code

Posted on January 1, 2019

Introduction Recently WordPress.com (and WordPress in general) has started pushing the new Gutenberg editor. It uses a block based model instead of a traditional document centric one. This I don’t like but I also don’t mind. It’s a different way of composing and I can see the benefit. However,... Continue reading

Mergesort in C

Posted on December 5, 2018

Introduction Quicksort is most people’s go to sort function and that’s not a bad thing because it’s a really good general purpose sorting algorithm. A good implementation is really fast and, being an in place algorithm, it uses very little memory. The big drawback of Quicksort is that... Continue reading
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