joesacher.com

The Bencode format is an interesting design. It is byte based, which makes it safe from big-endian and little-endian translations. I started playing with a Python script to automatically download torrents after searching various sources. I found that I needed to parse the actual torrent file to refine my ranking of good vs bad torrents.

This was a good time to learn the Bencode format, which I don't believe is used on anything but torrent files. The format is pretty simple, with only 4 different data structures: Byte String, Integer, List, and Dictionary.
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I've been a developer, on many different platforms, for just under two decades. Like many code monkeys, I enjoy learning new architectures. I'm not exactly sure why, but programming for WebOS has me more excited than I've been since working with GCC on the Palm Personal. The idea of building apps with web technologies on a portable device sounded interesting. I knew that certain things would be easy and others hard. That is always the case with any platform.

With Word Whirl queued up for release in the App Catalog, I decided it might help others to describe some of the things I've learned. This is my way of giving back to all the PreCentral users that helped during the process of taking Word Whirl from a request post to a published application. Hopefully this will help some more make the leap from Homebrew to App Catalog and get more apps out there.
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I used to have a copy of Neil's book, In the Beginning was the Command Line on my site. I noticed that I get a hit or two per day for this, with people following old links made around the web. So I decided to add a stub to help people find it from the previous page I used to host.

Neil now offers this on his site as a download.

Enjoy.