Cooking With Technology

Motorola Droid vs. Apple’s iPhone

peasleer — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 11:45:06 +0000

There has been a lot of hype around the Motorola Droid (release date October 30th, yay!), which I think is well-deserved. A lot of people, myself included, have been waiting for an Android phone on Verizon’s network since HTC came out with the G1 on T-Mobile. But with all the hype has come the inevitable [...]

Stop Tweeting. Stop Emailing.

peasleer — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 05:16:49 +0000

When presented with a means of communicating electronically, some people forget the guidelines of effective communication and turn into retards. These people need to be told to stop.

LostAFollower Alpha Release

peasleer — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 21:27:37 +0000

Managing relationships in social networks is difficult, just like managing real-world relationships is difficult. If someone unfriends you on Facebook, or stops following you on Twitter, is it because of something you posted? If a friend in real life stops talking to you, is it because of something you said? It can be difficult to [...]

Announcing: Barcamp Tacoma

peasleer — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:29:09 +0000

Mark your calendars and start thinking of topics to discuss: Tacoma's first annual Barcamp is coming August 8th, 2009 at Suite133!

mod_python Project Configuration Files

peasleer — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 13:00:35 +0000

In my last post I brought up how to get around mod_python’s default inability to handle relative paths for imported modules. The next night after writing that, I faced a very similar issue with configuration files. It is a sin to duplicate data in a project (except when caching), so most sane desktop applications will have [...]

Relative Import Paths Using Mod_Python

peasleer — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:00:29 +0000

A long while back (a year already? Jeeze!) David Brenner and I wrote a web application without using any frameworks, only mod_python and python server pages (PSP). We ran into a few problems along the way, one of which being that the import path mod_python used had to be composed of absolute paths. It isn’t [...]

Alien Milk

peasleer — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 00:39:22 +0000

This? This is tasty. Hope everyone is enjoying their weekend as much as I am – happy Valentine’s day!

Measuring Execution Time in Nanoseconds in Java

peasleer — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:46:25 +0000

Sometimes measuring time using the trusty System.currentTimeMillis() static call isn’t of high enough resolution to measure the execution time of methods with any meaning. Fortunately for those facing this problem, Java 5 introduced a method of accessing the system’s most precise clock through the System.nanoTime() static call. This returns a long that represents the current [...]

Reading Environment Variables in Java

peasleer — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:38:47 +0000

A quick search on google for “Reading environment variables in java” yielded a lot of (older) documentation stating that System.getEnv(”varname”) has been deprecated. This is no longer accurate, as System.getEnv(”varname”) and System.getEnv() have been reinstated as of Java 1.5. Quick post, I just wanted others to know that the API again exposes those useful method [...]

Part 2: Connections and Configuration

peasleer — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 12:30:40 +0000

In part one of this series, I covered the hardware and basic operating system installation for a home theater PC running Mythbuntu. In other words, part one covered the easy stuff. Running the audio cables between the PC and the TV is actually a more complicated affair than I had imagined, yielding three major issues [...]