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Programmer. Word.

Fiber for Jersey City

I just nominated Jersey City for Google’s Fiber to Communities project after I found out that Councilman Steve Fulop is also sponsoring it for JC. I’m sure he has considerably more pull than me, but I figured I’d help out. Here’s my submission:
Jersey City has a very homogenous set of residents, ranging from the gentrifying [...]

Posted 06 March 2010 § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

CouchDB: the last RESTful JSON store you’ll ever need

Today I gave a talk about CouchDB at the company I work for. I titled the talk “CouchDB: the last RESTful JSON store you’ll ever need”, which is of course an exaggeration, but our shop is heavy into Oracle and JSON services, so I geared the talk around presenting CouchDB as a viable alternative. I [...]

Posted 04 February 2010 § CouchDB ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

Announcing Couch Crawler, a CouchDB search engine/crawler

Hi! So, for fun, I made couch-crawler, a search engine and crawler on top of the very excellent couchdb-lucene. I wanted to create a hackable search engine for my work intranet using modern tools. Lucene is great, but the Nutch search engine/crawler was kind of annoying to work with. I couldn’t figure out how to [...]

Posted 17 January 2010 § CouchDB § Lucene § Python ‡ Comments (5) ° Tagged: , ,

Javascript sucks at sorting integers

In general, I heart Javascript. It’s one of the most misunderstood languages, but it has definitely made a comeback in a big way, not just with sweet client-side frameworks like Prototype and jQuery, but also on the server-side with CouchDB, MongoDB and Node.js.
But in its current form (Javascript 1.5), it sucks at sorting integers:
js> [...]

Posted 13 January 2010 § Javascript ‡ Comments (0) °

Merlke: a native Erlang build tool

After seriously diving into my pet Erlang project, I found myself clinging to Rake to do my builds. It was kind of unsatisfying though, especially once my builds became more complicated (hooray for code-generated parsers, leex/yecc). Why can we have Erlangs all the way down? Futhermore, OTP provides most of the build steps you’d wanna [...]

Posted 10 December 2009 § Erlang ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

Idea: Ikea for computer nerds

How does one make vga/dvi cabling look sheik? Where can I get a designer wifi router pedestal? What’s the best way to mount a dynamically updating grocery list screen onto my refrigerator?
These are the questions of the time. Who will step up to answer them?

Posted 01 December 2009 § Wishful thinking ‡ Comments (0) °

Tis the season to go quad core

I was briefly tempted by the various Black Friday marketing to get a PS3 to play some of the sweet exclusives coming out, like Uncharted 2 or Demon Souls, but instead I think I’m going to upgrade my home app server. Currently I’m running Ubuntu Jaunty on an old school Pentium 3 that my old [...]

Posted 29 November 2009 § Hardware ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: , ,

iGhost ride the iWhip

So cool to be so nerdy!

video and title stolen from Giles Bowkett

Posted 11 November 2009 § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

A sneak peak at a future Python feature

$ python
>>> from __future__ import braces
File “<stdin>”, line 1
SyntaxError: not a chance
>>>

Nice.

Posted 22 September 2009 § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °

Big Mac Math

The Economist shows an interesting chart comparing how much working time it takes to buy a Big Mac in different cities around the work. The New York City value looks like it’s about 17 minutes of work per Big Mac? Assuming 8 hour work days, that means New York earns about 28 Big Macs per [...]

Posted 21 August 2009 § Uncategorized ‡ Comments (0) °