If you’re writing a play application and using an actor, chances are you’re going to want to test that they work. This is pretty straight forward, but what happens when the actor itself needs to frobitz a whatsits every bleventy seconds?

My Scala development has gone from occasionally reading on the bus to actually using it as my primary development language 9-5. Which is awesome. After having done Martin Odersky’s course and having read the stairway book, I’d also recommend Scala for the Impatient to anyone as a second Scala book. The reason I’d recommend it second is that it’s very good at filling gaps that inevitably come up after the fact. (I still strongly recommend the stairway book as well).

I recently found a need for a Cocoa based implementation of a word cloud and ended up throwing one together. I know word clouds provide very little informational value and they’re kinda 2004 but I made it anyways. I’ve released the source under the Apache 2.0 license (as per the usual). More info is available at the Srs Biznas site (or in the case there’s a distant future where Srs Biznas no longer exists, here’s the GitHub link)

As both readers of this blog know, I’ve been working on an OS X client for Planets Nu (A web-based version of the old play-by-email game VGA Planets). The idea was to make something like EchoView for my own use, brush up on technologies I had been putting off and potentially have an app in the Mac App Store that pays for the Mac Developer Program registration fee.

CoreData. It’s one of those looming technologies of Cocoa that people put off. I did, most coders I know did. Mainly because it’s thought of as a big looming technology. If you’re not sure if you need to learn CoreData, take the following quiz:

Lately, I’ve been brushing up on my Cocoa by writing a Lion client for Planets Nu called PlanuPlanu. I’ve opened up the core of this as an LGPL library called PlanuKit. It’s nice to work on projects with no pending deadlines to learn facets of a technology you don’t have time to learn during business hours.

Let’s talk about code obfuscation for a minute. I’m not talking about the interesting puzzle obfuscation of competitions, but the kind done at compile time to protect intellectual property.

I’ve been writing a lot of C# middleware lately and it’s not uncommon to have a need for throwaway delegates.