Well, I thought I would share some tricks I use for easy data CRUD’s in C/C++/ObjC. I’m using sqlite here, but could apply to any database.

This is how my data access works - I’m not saying its the best approach, its just how I like it.

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/* The account table name */
#define ACCOUNT_TABLE "account"

/* a structure representing the account fields */
field_map account_values[] = {
  {"login", &acc->login, SQL_TEXT},
  {"email", &acc->email, SQL_TEXT},
  {"password", &acc->password, SQL_TEXT},
  {"timezone", &acc->timezone, SQL_INT},
  {0}
};

/* saves the fields to the database */
acc->id = db_save(account_values, ACCOUNT_TABLE, acc->id);

As you can see, saving a structure is as simple as creating a field_map table and calling db_save.

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/* loads one account by id */
if(db_load_by_id(account_values, ACCOUNT_TABLE, acc->id) != SQL_OK)
  fprintf(stderr, "could not load account");

/* a callback method */
void load_account_callback(sql_stmt *stmt);

/* load all accounts using the callback method */
if(db_load_all("account", load_account_callback) != SQL_OK)
  fprintf(stderr, "could not load accounts");

Loading is the same for single instances, but I use a callback method to load multiple instances.

AppHarbor is to .NET what Heroku is to Ruby, which is - awsome.

I’ve deployed a silverlight test app, Scrabby, to the cloud with no problems or cost. If you a lover of C# and midly confused by Azure then its cool enough to blog about.

Today I went to go work on an older C project of mine and cringed at the thought of configuring my autoconfigure build system. Needless to say I find it messy and obviously wasn’t working very well if I had to tweak it on a fresh install.

There is a very nice Gem called rake-builder which handles this in a very clean way:

Today I found myself generating HeaderDoc html for a project and implemented a system to host the docs inside my bitbucket repository. Here’s how I did it:

• First step is to create a project in bitbucket that is named after your account username in the format username.bitbucket.org.

• Clone the project and add an index.html to it. I added bootstrap as well. Commit and push back to master.

• Now assume I have a workspace folder devel with project xyz underneath that I use HeaderDoc with. I simply moved the documentation to username.bitbucket.org and made a symlink back to the project.

• I use the index.html as a landing portal for all projects with subfolders containing project documentation. You can reference the subdirectories like any other link.

    ◆ devel
        ╷
        ├───▸ username.bitbucket.org
        │         ╷
        │         ├───▸ index.html
        │         │
        │         └───▸ project documentation ──┐
        │                                       │
        └───▸ project                           │
                  ╷                             │
                  ├───▸ html ◂──────────────────┘
                  │
                  └───▸ src

*I have no idea why I put so much effort into that diagram - utf8 art using box drawing characters.

Ran across this absurd version control commit message generator. Even has a plugin for the best code editor around Sublime Text 2. The api is a simple index.txt for scripting:

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req = urllib2.Request('http://whatthecommit.com/index.txt')
res = urllib2.urlopen(req, timeout=5)
message = res.read().strip()

Was refactoring my octopress theme and I ran across a few helpful sites that were new to me.

The League of Moveable Type

A group of talented designers providing a collection of open-source font faces for the web. I pulled the *League Gothic” font from there.

Stripe Generator 2.0

A “Web 2.0” background image generator using stripes. Used for the darker background on this site.

Double J Design

A collection of icon packs, many of them free.

Sites with programmer quotes that always humble me with their laser-like honesty. I’ve decided to keep a collection of my favourites here (in no particular order).

• “They don’t make bugs like Bunny anymore.” - Olav Mjelde.

• “Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.” - Linus Torvalds

• “Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.” - Eric S. Raymond

• “In the one and only true way. The object-oriented version of ‘Spaghetti code’ is, of course, ‘Lasagna code’. (Too many layers).” - Roberto Waltman.

• “Talk is cheap. Show me the code.” - Linus Torvalds

In my last post on AppleScript’s, the README.md in the gist is embeded directly into the blog post.

To do this, I’ve modified the Octopress Gist plugin so that it renders Markdown files directly instead of in a code block.

The source is located on Github.