Sean Cook

The worst part of developing for the mobile web is ensuring that you’re accounting for the quirks of each of your target devices’ browsers.  I often compare this to developing for the fixed web circa 1998–  no matter how great your site looked in one browser, you still had to hack it to pieces to [...]

When I was working on my thesis for graduate school I spent months reading all that I could on optimizations that Java coders could consciously utilize while coding. While that was as exciting as it sounds*, I did manage to stumble across a few Java idioms that I’m surprised I don’t see used more often. [...]

Bitpim is an open-source program that allows a user to manipulate data on a CDMA handset, including the phone book, wallpapers, ringtones, and in some cases, the filesystem. While poking around the application’s source, which is written in python, I found a great class that provides a quick way to access the phone’s manufacturer, ESN, [...]

One of the easiest, most obvious ways to lower the data transfer footprint of your mobile apps is to compress data. For some reason, I still see mobile web decks that output XHTML-MP in plain text instead of very-easy-to-implement GZIP compression. I’ve implemented GZIP output on multiple J2EE projects with the help of Jayson Falkner’s [...]

I use the following Capistrano script to manage deployment of my blog to Dreamhost. It is a modified version of the deploy script provided on the Radiant CMS wiki, and it addresses two bugs involving the svn username and password.
To use it, capify your working rails directory and then replace /config/deploy.rb with the code [...]