Posted by Mike Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:34:00 GMT
Here I give in to a Silly Internet Meme (Tim made me do it).
mpierson@macbook:~$ history|\
awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s \n",a[i],i}}'|\
sort -rn|head
195 ls
121 g
83 svn
75 cd
71 sudo
50 less
32 grep
28 xbacklight
22 ssh
20 ./update.sh
“g” is an alias for gvim and “update.sh” is an IDM build script.
... and I've added Tim's “lh” to the macbook
Posted by Mike Mon, 03 Oct 2005 19:24:00 GMT
As Tim O'Reilly and Tim Bray say: 'there's still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means'. Herewith, my summary of O'Reilly's piece What Is Web 2.0.
O'Reilly describes priciples shared by successful 'Web 1.0' successes and interesting recent applications. See the meme map that came out of a brainstorming session of a FOO Camp conference.
Web as platform is an old idea but it's implementation has been refined. See Netscape vs. Google, DoubleClick vs. Ad Sense, Akamai vs. BitTorrent.
Open Source software, open content, collaborative categorization, viral marketing, all rely on a collective intelligence. Site attributes such as extensive (permanent) hyperlinks, low barriers to participation, organized content and meta data facilitate or enhance the affect of collective intelligence. Blogs are a special case of collective intelligence (and RSS a special attribute) in that the collective intelligence only emerges from a critical mass of blogs/articles.
Based on the way they approached their databases, MapQuest is a Web 1.0 story and Amazon is a Web 2.0 story. MapQuest licensed map data from Tele Atlas, but did not enhance (e.g. user annotations) or control the data. Amazon licensed ISBN data from R.R. Bowker and enhanced the data with data from publishers and customers. MapQuest was soon joined in the marketplace by competing services (Yahoo, Google, MSN) and Amazon is the standard source for bibliographic data.
In Web 2.0 software is delivered as a service not a product.
O'Reilly suggests a number of fundamental changes to the business model of software companies.
Simple, lightweight service interfaces appear to be successful with the masses (i.e. the intelligent collective). (One assumes that housingmaps.com enhances the value of Google maps?)
Three lessons identified:
ITunes, Tivo, blackberry...
Google/Flickr/Basecamp are at the forefront, but Yahoo and others have made AJAX the basis for major product releases.
O'Reilly finishes with a summary of the core compentencies of a Web 2.0 company:
Posted by mop Tue, 12 Apr 2005 15:30:00 GMT
Go read this short article by Sean McGrath on the subject of test driven documentation. Unit tests as documentation is not what Knuth had in mind when he coined the phrase Literate Programming, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Posted by mop Tue, 30 Nov 2004 01:43:00 GMT
X, as in eXtreme, not XML. XDoclet leverages metadata encoded withing Java classes as Javadocs, generating content (Java classes, JSPs, etc.) as part of a build process. The model is well suited to EJBs, Struts, as well as mixed content (generated plus hand crafted) files. XDoclet is also easy to apply in ad-hoc situations.
The premise is simple enough: put a custom javadoc tag in a Java source file then apply an XDoclet transform to produce a helper class, a JSP, a unit test, whatever. The transform can be as simple as an XDt template that references the custom javadoc tag, or a custom Java-based processor that applies complex logic to the tag-encoded metadata.
Posted by mop Mon, 01 Nov 2004 23:22:00 GMT
Some tidbits from my Bloglines RSS subscriptions.
"Lint4j ("Lint for Java") is a static Java source code analyzer that detects locking and threading issues, performance and scalability problems, and checks complex contracts such as Java serialization by performing type, data flow, and lock graph analysis."
It’s Wiki++. Typical intranet functionality is available to Wiki users. As seen on John Udell’s blog. (I’ve added John’s blog to my roll.)
Blogs aren’t just for people, you’re processes should be blogging too. Oh yeah.
ISOs and pointers for those brave enough to run Dell servers.
Posted by mop Wed, 20 Oct 2004 16:30:00 GMT
Lucene is a Java system for "high-performance, full-featured text search". The software apears to be mature, and the community has produced a fair bit of documentation. A replacement for RDBMS-based searches?
No doubt that the searching is more intuitive, and would make it easier for users to perform keyword searches. Not sure that a Google-like engine could match RDBMS for field-based searching and fancy list navigation.
Posted by mop Fri, 10 Sep 2004 15:47:00 GMT
Some clever solutions to file for a rainy day...
Matt Kruse seems to have done a good job creating a flexible Javascript object for browser popups. It support tool-tip style boxes, as well as traditional pop-up windows.
Norm Walsh, the don of DocBook, mentioned Matt’s work in his discussion of DocBook annotations.
John Cowan wrote a SAX compatible parser for ’nasty and brutish’ HTML, called Tag Soup. This lenient parser takes poorly formatted HTML snippets and parses them into a valid tree. Seems like a must-have for any web application that allows users to enter HTML mark-up.
Norm Walsh uses Tag Soup to parse comments authored by visitors to his blog. Interesting that even the comments to Norm’s blog are syndicated.
Posted by mop Wed, 11 Aug 2004 16:46:00 GMT
Herewith some notes from my attempt to migrate a database instance from Microsoft SQL Server 7 to PostgreSQL 7.3. My journey began with Ian Harding’s how-to, and it’s a good place to start.
The bcp utility is a quick and flexible command line utility that extracts raw table data (or query result) to a file. It works pretty much as advertised, with the only tricky parts being the treatment of nulls and character encoding. Ian suggested using the -k parameter which forces bcp to use a null character (x00) to represent an empty field, it’s probably the right thing to do. Unfortunately bcp does not distinguish between empty fields(i.e. value is null) and fields containing an empty string. Character encoding can be dealt with in two ways: the -c parameter will force all text data into ASCII text, or the -w parameter will encode text as UTF-16. The two-byte representation would be a no-brainer, except that the data swells to (almost) twice the original size.
Here’s what I used for each table in the database:
bcp dbname..tablename out ’filename’ -w -k -t "<f-end>" -r "<record-end>" -b 1000
where -b is the number of rows per transaction, and the -t and -r parameters indicate the field and record delimiters. The key when choosing delimiters is to avoid conflicts with field values.
Here’s what I did to the export of each table (after moving files to a Linux box):
# transform to 8 bit encoding recode utf-16..utf-8 $1 # TODO check for literal ’ ’, ’ ’ # replace back slash with forward slash perl -pi -e ’s!\!/!g’ $1 # replace tabs with literal ’ ’ perl -pi -e ’s/ /\t/g’ $1 # replace line breaks with literal ’ ’ perl -pi -e ’s/ /\n/g’ $1 # replace field delimiter with tabs perl -pi -e ’s/<f-end>/ /g’ $1 # replace record delimiters with line break perl -pi -e ’s/<record-end>/ /g’ $1 # remove Windoze line feeds perl -pi -e ’s/ //g’ $1 # remove nulls perl -pi -e ’s/x00//g’ $1
Here’s the step by step explanation:
Notes: next time around I’ll use sed instead of perl, but I was too lazy to check the syntax of recode for stream ops; you’ll see that the null characters inserted by bcp to represent empty fields are being stripped - could be that we don’t need the nulls in the exports, or that we should keep them in the export and convince PostgreSQL that they are significant.
I used brute force. It would be nice to build a schema.sql script with ant and makedata.
The COPY command allows table data to be imported from a local file. The only tricky part is the interpretation of null field values; following Ian’s lead I’ve specified the empty string:
COPY tablename FROM ’filename’ WITH NULL AS ’’;
This approach worked for all tables except those that contained empty strings in columns defined as ’NOT NULL’. I kluged these tables by altering the schema: "... ALTER COLUMN xxx DROP NOT NULL".
It’s probably also a good idea to run the maintenance.sql script to clean up some tables before extracting. Smaller is better.
Older posts: 1 2
