JSON bigger than XML??? #MarkupGeek

Continuing to chip away at my little Android programming projects, this week I put together some code to consume data from a JSON-formatted web feed.  JSON is more streamlined than XML and also happens to avoid certain cross-domain security roadblocks.  This means JSON is often a great choice for encapsulating objects and data that are destined for transport via web services over cell phone data plans.  It was a surprise, therefore, when I unexpectedly ran across an example of XML that was less verbose (smaller!) than its JSON equivalent...

Unplugged...again! (Spiceworks and AMD)

I've been tapped to sit on the next Spiceworks Unplugged panel, this time for a private AMD event.  The last panel I sat on was a *blast* and the Dell folks I talked to afterward seemed pretty pleased with the event.  Looking back at my post following that Unplugged event, however, I now realize that I never actually got around to mentioning what Spiceworks is...

New Kindle = Less Sleep (but not from reading)

This week a school raffle blessed my wife with a new Kindle3 (the nicer variation with 3G and no ads).  This isn't the first time she's done well in the contests of luck department...

Android programming with Basic4Android

Moving along from my initial foray into creating Android apps with Google's nifty but somewhat impractical AppInventor, I sought out other free (or nearly free) products that boasted a visual designer. Enter "Basic4Android", an IDE built using LUA to abstract the underlying Android JAVA classes and present a language very similar to Visual Basic...