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Unicode and UTF Overview

This post is a brief technival overview of Unicode, a widely used standard for multilingual character representation, and the family of UTF-x encoding algorithms. First a brief introduction to Unicode: Unicode is intended to address the need for a workable, reliable world text encoding. Unicode could be roughly described as “wide-body ASCII” that has been [...]

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Advice for Android Developers: Prepare for App Acquisition

Here’s a brief but important advice for Android app developers: starting with your first app, prepare for the situation where a company wants to acquire one of your applications. Use a unique signing key (alias) for each app! Else you’ll be forced to either cancel the acquisition or hand out the key you use for [...]

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Useful Linux Command of the Day: compgen

I’ve just learned about a particularly nice Linux shell command: compgen $ compgen -c … list all the commands you could run. $ compgen -a … list all the aliases you could run. $ compgen -b … list all the built-ins you could run. $ compgen -k … list all the keywords you could run. [...]

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Amazon Releases Open Source Android and iPhone SDK for S3, SimpleDB, SQS and SNS

Amazon has just released an open source (Apache 2.0 licensed) SDK for Android and iPhone which greatly simplifies using S3, SimpleDB, Simple Queue Service (SQS) and Simple Notification Service (SNS). A mobile application has two basic approaches for interacting with Amazon’s Web Services: Proxying requests through a server Making the requests directly from the mobile [...]

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How to Setup Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) in Eclipse, including the Galaxy Tab SDK

Today Android version 2.3 (Gingerbread, API Level 9) was released, including an updated Android plugin for Eclipse and the API Level 9 SDK. The release includes some very welcome updates for both users and developers, including better text selection tools, access to more sensor data, improved garbage collection, updated video drivers for better OpenGL performance, [...]

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