I got involved with GameBoy advance development in 2001 shortly after the release of the device on the European market. At the time, the PC demoscene had already moved to producing those horrible hardware-accelerated 3D demos and it was time for me to move on. In my eyes, the GBA scene provided a refuge for the 2D and bitmapped graphics lovers, and so I spent some time playing with the device....
It’s been a little bit more than three years since Telize public API was permanently shut down on November 15th, 2015. I have previously written about the adventure itself, and about the decommissioning of the API. Before shutting down the public API of Telize, a paid version was launched on Mashape to ease the transition for those who couldn’t host their own instances. The Mashape API Marketplace became a part of RapidAPI last year, the service is still running and will keep doing so for the foreseeable future....
It recently occurred to me that I have been using modems for more than 20 years now. How time flies… That got me thinking about my early modem days, calling BBSes in what was then my local area (Toulouse, France). One of the best memories I have from the BBS era is without doubt split-screen chatting. This mode of chatting has something magical in the sense that you can see characters appear on screen as soon as the person on the other side of the line types them....
This is a sequel to my “Adventures in running a free public API” post which you should read for some background information about the reasons behind terminating the free public instance of Telize. I stopped the service as planned, on November 15th, after a two weeks notice. I should probably mention beforehand that things were more complicated that they could have been due to poor initial planning on my part. When I launched the public instance, it was mean as a way to demonstrate the open source project, and to be honest I didn’t really anticipate the amount of traffic it would receive....
The first iteration of Telize launched on April 20th, 2013. It started as a simple endpoint returning the client IP address in plain text, directly from Nginx, using the third party HTTP Echo module. As there was no application server being involved, latency was very good and people started using it. The current iteration launched on August 21th 2013, and introduced a REST API built on Nginx and Lua allowing to get a visitor IP address and to query location information from any IP address....
Window Maker is one of the very few graphical user interfaces which I would call timeless. Despite the fact it hasn’t evolved graphically for almost 20 years, it still looks clean and beautiful by today standards, whereas AfterStep now looks terribly old and outdated. In fact, it is one of those very few intemporal interfaces which left a huge impact on me over the years: Early Macintosh System Software on the Macintosh Plus, the first GUI I ever used in the mid-eighties GEM (Graphical Environment Manager), customized CGA version on an Amstrad PC 1512 FVWM (F Virtual Window Manager), my first X11 love story BeOS, in the late nineties, a clean, bright, and colorful UI which still looks crisp and modern I loved the default BeOS color scheme so much that I’m using it as my Window Maker theme:...
Ever since we shifted away from the MS-DOS era, I have always been missing the ability to take video memory dumps in order to capture text screens. If you remember the screen capture utility THEGRAB.EXE, bundled with TheDraw ansi editor, it did exactly that: the program stayed resident in memory and dumped the screen when a shortcut was triggered. On UN*X operating systems, you can use the script command to record terminal sessions, but then you have to edit files manually if you want to get a particular state or screen… Enter SyncTERM, an SDL-based multi-platform BBS terminal program also supporting telnet, RLogin, and SSH connections....
SciTE is a lightweight, fast, and crystal clear text and code editor for those who love minimalism and efficiency. It is, however, a fully featured and highly customizable editor supporting tabbed files, code folding, and language specific syntax highlighting. It is one of my editors of choice for small projects: actually, I’m typing this article using it. SciTE feels oldschool, a reminiscing gem from a software era when efficiency prevailed over complexity and bloating: in fact it feels so good that I decided to use FVWM (which is, for the record, the first Window Manager I ever used back in early 1996) to take a screenshot....
GoogleCL, which stands for Google Command Line, is a collection of tools allowing users to access the Google Data APIs. They are particularly useful for those who wish to accomplish automated tasks such as posting news articles on Blogger, scheduling appointments on Google Calendar, adding and editing documents on Google Docs, and so on and so far. On top of that, it also offer the ability to upload images and videos on Picasa and Youtube respectively....
I was quite delighted this morning when I discovered Youtube’s custom HTTP 500 server error message for the first time: **500 Internal Server Error** Sorry, something went wrong. A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation. If you see them, show them this information: This message was followed by information encoded in modified base64 for URL applications (base64url encoding), which differs from original base64 by the fact that the padding character ‘=’ is dismissed and the ‘+’ and ‘/’ characters gets respectively replaced by ‘-’ and ‘_’ characters....