Notes on Cloure XML Parsing (Wednesday, June 23, 2010) - I figured I'd share some quick notes I had on a simple task that's not exactly strait forward in Clojure to the Lisp neophyte, like myself: XML Parsing. Clojure goes a long way to making it easy with clojure.xml.parse/xml-seq but complete/concise examples can be difficult to come by. XML All of the examples I'll outline below will depend on the following xml
My Tool List (Monday, October 26, 2009) - One of the more popular thing's Scott Hanselman has done is maintain a tool List, essentially a list of applications and utilities that he's found useful. There are plenty of absolute gems in his list and rather than present my own I'd be very comfortable just pointing you to his... But what fun would that be? None! I also think there are a few more that I can add
Ruby in my Enterprise with JRuby Thanks to JRubyConf (Thursday, October 07, 2010) - Last weekend I went to JRubyConf and had a blast. I left armed with some new knowledge, some new contacts and a new academic appreciation for /whiske?y/. One of the best parts is that I really only had to pay for the hotel because I won the ticket at a Pittsburgh Ruby Brigade meeting. Now, even though I was attending a JRuby conference I wasn't really all that familiar
Rich-Style Formatting of an Android TextView (Saturday, August 28, 2010) - Even a developer-friendly mobile platform like Android can have a developer feeling a little lost when trying to perform simple tasks when you're unfamiliar with the platform. One of these simple, however poorly documented, tasks is rich-style text formatting within a TextView. SpannableString While it's possible to set a TextView's text property to a simple
Groovy: Dynamic Language for the JVM... Groovy! (Friday, October 23, 2009) - I'm continuously encouraged by the influence dynamic languages such as Ruby and Python have had on mainstream runtimes like the CLR and JVM. Direct ports like JRuby, Jython to the JVM and IronRuby and IronPython to the CLR are truly exciting. More exciting still are languages like Boo that are built from the ground up for mainstream runtimes. I've finally had
Employing Solr/Lucene with SQL Server for Full-Text Searching (Saturday, December 05, 2009) - I've been fiddling with Lucene a good bit of late and have been quite impressed. It's more than just a "blazing fast" full-text indexing system, especially when implemented via Solr. With Solr it becomes an incredibly scalable, full-featured and extensible search engine platform. I had always assumed that the Lucene stack wasn't for me. For the most part I
Google Wave Robots in Java (Monday, December 07, 2009) - When Google Wave was first announced I was pretty excited. The concept seemed perfect. Broad like twitter but rich like email. Brief like instant messenger but collaborative like a message board. Things have been somewhat slow going in beta thus far. But hey, it's still beta. If Google refines it a bit and wave catches on (what actual does catch on these
Clojure, A Lisp for the JVM and CLR (Sunday, December 13, 2009) - I've been becoming increasingly interested in functional languages in the last few years and I'm apparently not the only one. It's pretty hard to listen to any general purpose software development podcast without hearing about Erlang, Haskell or F#. Another one came up recently that I just had to play with. It's a Lisp variant named Clojure. The reason I find
Mirah, Ruby Syntax on the JVM (Tuesday, March 29, 2011) - Although languages like Java and C# have soured with me over the last few years I still believe their runtimes (the JVM and CLR respectively) are sound. A sizable portion of the code I write for my day job is in JRuby. We get a number of advantages from that. We can use the industrial-strength infrastructure components Java brings to the table and leverage mountains
