Disclaimer: This blog entry isn’t technical like most of my blog entries, but instead is a rant about a negative experience had at a show at an amusement park and a restaurant. This last weekend (2012-09-12) Maryanne and I took the kids to the Kemah Boardwalk for a day of...

Here’s a tidbit I picked up from Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2823316/generate-a-random-letter-in-python) that I found helpful. I found the need to generate a random string of digits, but didn’t want to just loop and concatenate. I was pretty sure there was a more Pythonic way to do this, and turns out I...

Quick entry to point out that my Yahoo! BOSS PlaceFinder API Python module, placefinder-py, has a new 0.3 release. This release includes: Added function to reverse-geocode latitude/longitude Changed unit tests to be able to be run by nose So go and check out the wiki documentation to see the latest...

Today I learned a nifty trick in Python using list comprehensions. If you don’t know what list comprehensions are check out http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0202/. I recently had a scenario where I wanted to find the first item in a list that matched a single criteria. A basic loop can certainly do the...

I am happy to announce the release of placefinder-py, a Python module for consuming the Yahoo! BOSS PlaceFinder geocoding services. placefinder-py helps developers looking to add location geocoding to their applications and web sites easier to do by simplifying REST calls and OAuth authentication. Geocoding is the task of taking...

I’ve been working on a few projects and I have been in the process of moving them to Amazon EC2. Up until this point I have been writing Bash shell scripts, connecting to my servers and EC2 instances via SSH, then running the shell scripts manually. Then I learned about...

Here lately I’ve taken to writing a bit more code in Python. It isn’t my first time around in this lovely language, but for the last few months I’ve spent more time in Groovy and Grails, and I felt it was time to revisit the language where whitespace matters. Most...

While working on a project in Grails 2.1.0 (on Windows 7 64-bit) I ran into an interesting error. Aug 29, 2012 7:17:21 PM com.springsource.loaded.agent.SpringLoadedPreProcessor preProcess SEVERE: Unexpected problem transforming call sites java.lang.IllegalStateException: Unexpected problem processing bytes for class at com.springsource.loaded.ConstantPoolChecker2.readConstantPool(ConstantPoolChecker2.java:182) at com.springsource.loaded.ConstantPoolChecker2.(ConstantPoolChecker2.java:114) at com.springsource.loaded.ConstantPoolChecker2.getReferences(ConstantPoolChecker2.java:88) at com.springsource.loaded.MethodInvokerRewriter.rewrite(MethodInvokerRewriter.java:248) at com.springsource.loaded.MethodInvokerRewriter.rewriteUsingCache(MethodInvokerRewriter.java:141) at com.springsource.loaded.TypeRegistry.methodCallRewriteUseCacheIfAvailable(TypeRegistry.java:775)...

In light of the recent proposed CISPA bill, HR 3523, I have written my House Representative Ralph Hall the following letter. I encourage you to do the same if you feel that this bill would be potentially detrimental to online privacy. Dear Mr. Hall, I am writing you in regards...

Yesterday I was reading various articles online and stumbled across 0x10c.com. Although I won’t go into any details of that project (you’ll just have to click to see) it did make me slightly nostalgic for one of the first languages I learned, C/C++. I happen to be one of those...