Programming Stuff

I'm a huge fan of Fallout 3 - one of the greatest games I've ever played, and also one of the most bug-free. :) And ever since I "hacked" the first terminal in the game I immediately thought: "Wait, programming a tool which is way better at guessing the correct password can't be hard."

So I made this little program in my lunch-break: You just enter all the passwords and it suggests a guess. After each guess you can enter the number of correct letters and it narrows down your choices, a task a computer is way better at than, well, let's say... me. :-) This is version 0.9 and I'm not 100% sure it works correctly, but I still found it helpful already.

Update 0.91:

• Reset-Button: allows to reset all fields.
• +/- buttons to add / remove fields as needed.

Version 0.91
download f3ht.jar

Ever wondered where all that cash from your pocket went? Well, I do, occasionally. :p Carrying around pen&paper to write down all the little expenses seemed completely inacceptable to a 21st century tech freak like me. :) But my Blackberry, I carry it around all the day already, so it would be ideal to track my expenses there. That's how my Blackberry Expenses app got born.

Blackberry Expenses is a very simple app for Blackberry OS based on J2ME and the RIM classes, allowing you to add, remove and edit your expenses quickly with a minimum of input. It's designed to be your pen&paper replacement, with the great advantage of being able to transfer the list wirelessly to your PC/Mac for use in your favorite number cruncher (Excel, Numbers or whatever). And best of all: It's free - as in free beer! ;)

Features:

• tracks Expenses with date, time, description and amount
• stores the list persistently on your device, directly after each input, so sudden power loss or a reboot is not a problem
• export as CSV (comma separated values), a very common format which can be imported by almost every spreadsheet app (e.g. Excel, OpenOffice, NeoOffice, Numbers...)
• export via Bluetooth!
• graphical expense chart, featuring bar and line chart types

See the SourceForge project site for screenshots.

Version 1.21
download Blackberry Expenses

The Apple light sensors built into my MacBook Pro are some amazing bits of tech. I imagined that they could be used as a kind of contact less control, so I always wanted to write a full-blown HID driver for them, making them a single-button device. Well, haven't got there yet. :p

However, even if I didn't come up with anything really useful, I thought many people would like to have an Objective-C class which allows them to easily retrieve the readings from the sensors. That's exactly what you find in the download below, a simple class called AmbientLightSensor. It allows you to retrieve the readings for the left and right sensors individually as well as in form of a factor ranging from 0 through 1, taking min and max values retrieved so far into account.

It's MIT license, so feel free to use it in any kind of project. If you like it, sent me a note of your project, always interested. :)

Version 1.0
download AmbientLightSensor