Today I had a sticky problem to solve, the kind business app programmers drool over because it’s nontrivial and contained. Halfway through the TDD process, my logic got all jumbled and I couldn’t see the solution. Stepping back, I took ten minutes to write pseudocode in an F# style, then translated that into Java. Bam! … Read moreF# made Java easier today
I’m switching from IDEA to Eclipse for the sake of conformity, with a great deal of mourning. No, it’s not ideal, but it’s a startup and not a good time to shave a yak. Here are some features I miss. If you know how to do this in Eclipse, please, post a comment! * Save … Read moreOh, IntelliJ IDEA, how I miss you
When you’re first setting up Google Analytics for your website, you’ll want to do some testing in your local or test environment. The good news is: testing of the transmission is fast. The bad news is: testing the processing is not. This post describes the process. Here’s what you need: A google analytics account. It’s … Read moreTesting Google Analytics locally
Say there’s a program that needs to run on your Mac all the time forever and ever. This post describes how to set that up. The example here sets up the script that runs elasticsearch.* On a Mac, services are controlled by launchd, which is configured using launchctl. This example uses launchctl to set up … Read moreservices on a Mac
elasticsearch is trivially easy to set up and start using with reasonable default settings. Like any framework, deviating from those defaults increases the challenge. Phonetic searches like soundex are supported by elasticsearch, but not out-of-the-box. What is soundex? It classifies words according to how they sound, so that similar-sounding words will match each other in … Read moreconfiguring soundex in elasticsearch
elasticsearch is a wrapper around Lucene that supports distributed, scalable search, particularly compatible with Amazon’s EC2 setup. The fun part about elasticsearch is the installation and setup (on a Mac): step 1) download it.step 2) unzip that file.step 3) go to that directory and run bin/elasticsearch Done. Ready to go. Proceed with inserting data. Except! … Read moreelasticsearch: first things first
There are a zillion examples of what to type to insert into elasticsearch. But what does each part mean? Shoving information into elasticsearch is pretty easy. You don’t have to set anything up. (so, if you have a typo, good luck figuring out later where your data went. This is the price of sensible defaults.) … Read moreInserting data into elasticsearch over HTTP: a breakdown
SICP insight of the day: iterative programming doesn’t require a for loop. Tail recursion is iterative programming. It looks very close to recursion, but the distinction is: a program is iterative if everything it needs is stored in a few state variables. In an imperative style the state is stored in mutable variables. In a … Read moreLessons from SICP: what is iterative programming?
test { exclude ‘**/Manual*’} this is here because I know I will forget it.
The previous post discussed advantages of using a continuation style to send our code to the data instead of making our code wait for the data to come back to it. This pseudocode example has three I/O operations, each encasing the operations which should follow in a callback function parameter. let filename = // calculate … Read moreContinuation Style Without the Fugly