Blog
March 14th, 2006
Amazon S3 was just released today, giving developers/companies the ability to instantly store files/data up to 5GB in size - and as many as you want. They just charge pennies for bandwidth and storage costs.
Are you looking for a new way to make money?
Wrap a quick reverse proxy on top of the public S3 URLs, require any of the above to use a secure password, charge $X dollars/month. Presto, instant data storage company.
Tags: amazon, s3, java, programming, perl, lazyweb
3 Comments on 'Amazon S3'
July 21st, 2005
In your newsreader, subscribe to your favorite programming module RSS feed:
Unfortunately, those are really the only languages with any sort of repository, which is a shame. Regardless, I'm finding that being subscribed to both the Perl and Javascript RSS feeds is really helping me to catch the latest developments/advancements and include them in my projects.
Update: Added PHP, thanks to Brendyn!
Tags: raa, cpan, jsan, rss, ruby, perl, javascript, module
2 Comments on 'Programming News via RSS'
July 20th, 2005
JSAN (The Javascript Archive Network) was recently announced at the North American Perl Conference as a repository for Javascript code, simliar to the archive that Perl has (CPAN). When I first checked it out, it was pretty barebones, but now it has many more features and a growing number of packages for people to play with. I definitely recommend that you check out the service - especially some of the modules and their test frameworks - it all has a lot of potential. I plan on wrapping up some of my Javascript code in the upcoming weeks so that I can distribute it on this site. Based upon the clarity of the code that's already up there - I have a good mark to strive for.
Tags: javascript, perl, archive, package, jsan
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July 10th, 2005
I've just finished up an excellent hack which brings the power of address translation (converting a US Postal Address into a Latitude/Longitude) to the Google Maps API - something that wasn't provided in the default distribution. There's a ton of information available, including demos, screenshots, and code on the project page: Google Address Translation.
Tags: google, maps, api, hacks, geo, perl, javascript, programming
2 Comments on 'Google Address Translation'
April 20th, 2005
This tool goes through your current Google Search History, grabs all of your recent searches and turns it into an RSS feed. Would work best set up as a nightly/hourly cron job, redirecting to a file.
This tool is written in Perl and uses a few, slick, modules: WWW::Mechanize, XML::LibXML, and XML::RSS. I was influenced by the very nice webscrape tool when building this.
A sample, from my searches, can be found here:
http://ejohn.org/apps/ghistory/google.rdf
And how it looks in my newsreader (Newsgator):
Downloads
Tags: perl, google, search, rss, popular
8 Comments on 'Google Search History RSS'
March 20th, 2005
Even though I was terribly busy, I still managed to make a number of project updates this weekend. Most of the updates were just writing up some documentation and getting them out the door, but that's something.
- FOAF Layout - Did a possible FOAF layout for Bob Aman. I wanted a clean, concise, layout which downgraded nicely (and even had a little bit of Javascript flare).
- Log Session Analyis - Analyzes Apache logs looking for all unique sessions that occur. Also grabs a bunch of other fun stuff (such as number of people reading RSS feeds.
- Dom Snap - Make two DOM objects 'snap' to each other and move around together.
- Finally wrote some documentation for three of my Perl Modules, and put them up on CPAN: Net::Netflix, Net::Amazon::DVD2IMDB, and Net::DVDProfiler. I hope to package up a couple other modules and get them out the door here soon.
Also, I've moved this site over to a new server (which is also hosting juniperbay.com, amoungst other things). It's terribly nice - hopefully the uptime will be much better then my old server.
Tags: apache, javascript, perl, modules, projects, site
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January 21st, 2005
Tonight is the 4th RedBull Programming Competition and I've got a feeling that team Perl is going to do well. Looking at the other teams, the majority of them are freshman and, therefore, not a major concern.
I'm hoping for some good challanges this time around as this is my fourth time competing. The first time I was on a team with Tristan and Scott working to build a Multi-User Dungeon. The result was interesting, we had randomly generated dungeons and monsters with a simple AI. For the second competition my team was with Jordan, Chris, Pete, and Luke (the original team Perl). We built a file browser and won the competition. The third time I went alone and hacked out another simple dungeon.
I enjoy programming under pressure like this, it's enjoyable and the results are always fun (although, I almost never touch them later, which is unfortunate). I hope to post some updates from the competition itself, and possibly some pictures. Go Team Perl!
Tags: competition, perl, programming
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January 19th, 2005
The majority of my free time, lately, has been going into redesigning the RIT Schedule Maker, which I released two years ago, on the 29th. For the anniversary I'm planning on releasing a demo of the new application for people to play around with and get use to.
On a side note: I'm really enjoying designing web applications. Creating GUIs using HTML/Javascript is not too far away from Swing/Java (in my opinion), of course the difference in how it looks and operates is rather drastic.
The big change with this redesign is the fact that the entire application is in the form of a single page with changes being made by Javascript. Of course, this doesn't fair too well in older browsers, but it's a sacrafice that's going to have to be made. (of course, the number of people who actually use non-modern browsers is rather minimal) I've been trying very hard to make this version user friendly, hiding a lot of features and keeping the interface as simple as possible. (Which is a challenge considering the premise of the application.)
I just finished purchasing the hosting from an interesting company called Web Site Source, the cost was so minimal that it really doesn't matter if they're bad or not, I can always just transfer away later. I'm really excited, more details are coming soon.
Tags: db, javascript, perl, schedule
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