Err and err and err but less and less and less
Err and err and err but less and less and less
As you might know, my primary background stems from the field of academia and research, but over the past years my interests have focused increasingly on software engineering. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear to me today that if I had known what I know today about software, I would without doubt have been […]
I spent most of the day today debugging a very mysterious error we encountered when trying to programmatically call a web service over SSL from Java. Here is the source code with which we managed to reliable reproduce the error: import javax.net.SocketFactory; import javax.net.ssl.SSLSocketFactory; import java.io.*; import java.net.Socket; public class SimpleSSLTest { public static void […]
MATLAB seems to have a very peculiar notion on how to represent dates and times. Yesterday I spent a wonderful couple of hours debugging some code that’s supposed to compute the sun’s position, most of which could have been avoided if the MATLAB designers had followed a simple convention used by, I believe, most computing […]
ESP-r, is an integrated modelling tool for the simulation of the thermal, visual and acoustic performance of buildings and the assessment of the energy use and gaseous emissions associated with the environmental control systems and constructional materials, in the words of its official website. In other words, it’s a computer program for modeling a building’s […]
I think there’s no escaping this simple fact: the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is definitely here to stay, and all the evidence shows that it has tremendous potential for being used in home automation devices. I still remember from a previous life when we hunted for a JVM implementation that would run with a minimal […]
In a previous post I described how I tweaked my WordPress installation to support the display of MathML markup, for displaying mathematical equations. One of the steps involved changing the content-type from application/html to application/xhtml+xml. That step was necessary, or else Firefox would simply not render the MathML markup properly. Unfortunately, application/xhtml+xml is simply not […]
Here is how you compute the thermal coupling between a room’s indoor temperature and the outdoor temperature due to infiltrations. The equation governing the exchange of heat is as follows: Cair × dT/dt = g × Δ T where Cair is the indoor air thermal mass [J/K], T is the indoor air temperature [K], g […]
Here is a very common problem: suppose you’re give a series of event timestamps. The events can be anything—website logins, persons entering a building, anything that recurs regularly in time but whose rate of arrival is not known in advance. Here is, for example, such a file which I had to analyze: 05.02.2010 09:00:18 05.02.2010 […]
I began reading Ken Schwaber’s ‘Agile Project Management with Scrum’ for two reasons: 1) it’s a book about Scrum, and 2) it’s from Ken Schwaber, one of the fathers of Scrum. Having now read it, I think these are the only reasons I don’t entirely regret reading it. The book is a series of case […]
UPDATE I’ve decided to disable direct MathML support on this blog due to the many browser incompatibilities it introduces. You can read the original version of this post on this blog’s former home