Category Archives: Code

Using Groovy AST to Add Common Properties to Grails Domain Classes

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Geoff Lane

Groovy offers a lot of runtime meta-programming capabilities that allow you to add reusable functionality in a shared fashion. Grails plugins make use of this ability to enhance your project. One of the things that you can’t do with runtime … Continue reading →

Posted in Code, Groovy | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Check Multiple Mercurial Repositories for Incoming Changes

Posted on August 26, 2011 by Geoff Lane

Currently I have a whole bunch of Mercurial repositories in a directory. All of these are cloned from a central repository that the team pushes their changes to. I like to generally keep my local repositories up-to-date so that I … Continue reading →

Posted in Automation | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Java Return from Finally

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Geoff Lane

try…catch…finally is the common idiom in Java for exception handling and cleanup. The thing that people may not know is that returning from within a finally block has the unintended consequence of stoping an exception from propagating up the call … Continue reading →

Posted in Java | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

USB to Serial Adapters in VMWare

Posted on March 2, 2011 by Geoff Lane

I needed to do some work using a pin pad (a device that allows you to enter a numeric code at a point-of-sale or other system) and needed to test it in a 32bit Windows environment. The pin pad uses … Continue reading →

Posted in Code | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

What is the Cost of Not Doing Things?

Posted on January 27, 2011 by Geoff Lane

We’re really good at measuring the cost of some things. We’re good at measuring the cost of a new computers for everyone on the team, we’re good at measuring the cost per hour of a resource on a project and … Continue reading →

Posted in Code | Tagged , | 3 Comments

NoSQL with MongoDB and Ruby Presentation

Posted on November 15, 2010 by Geoff Lane

I presented at the Milwaukee Ruby User’s Group tonight on NoSQL using MongoDB and Ruby. Code Snippets for the Presentation Basic Operations   // insert data db.factories.insert( { name: "Miller", metro: { city: "Milwaukee", state: "WI" } } ); db.factories.insert( … Continue reading →

Posted in Code, Ruby | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

MongoDB: MapReduce Functions for Grouping

Posted on October 4, 2010 by Geoff Lane

SQL GROUP BY allows you to perform aggregate functions on data sets; To count all of the stores in each state, to average a series of related numbers, etc. MongoDB has some aggregate functions but they are fairly limited in … Continue reading →

Posted in Code | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

MongoDB Replication is Easy

Posted on August 8, 2010 by Geoff Lane

Database replication with MongoDB is easy to setup. Replication duplicates all of the data from a master to one or more slave instances and allows for safety and quick recovery in case of a problem with your master database. Here … Continue reading →

Posted in Code | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

MongoDB and Java: Find an item by Id

Posted on June 17, 2010 by Geoff Lane

MongoDB is one of a number of new databases that have cropped up lately eschewing SQL. These NoSQL databases provide non-relational models that are suitable for solving different kinds of problems. This camp includes document oriented, tabular and key/value oriented … Continue reading →

Posted in Code, Java | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Random but Evenly Distributed Sets of Numbers

Posted on April 17, 2010 by Geoff Lane

Let’s say one is a computer programmer and let’s say one’s wife (or roommate; or significant other) does social science research (a totally hypothetical scenario of course). When doing social science research one needs to create randomized groups of participants. … Continue reading →

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