Although I haven’t mentioned it in a while, I’m still continuing development on my Vaadin project. As with all new technology, sometimes some frustration is involved. Here’s an overview of how I’m currently using Spring’s transaction management and its JDO support. The setup seems easy enough, until you try to run it on the actual AppEngine. Turns out there are some details you need to take care of.
While learning Python, I’ve also been thinking about what the perfect programming language should look like. So Rob Pike’s talk at OSCON on the reasons behind Google’s Go came at the perfect time.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned my new way of tracking my budget and also figured that there’s one gaping hole: importing bank statements. This is part 1, where I create a simple parser for bank statements provided by my bank in CSV format.
It’s something I’d been wondering for a while: how does GWT’s JavaScript code stack up to code created and optimized by hand? I hadn’t really seen any exact data, until now.
Today, I have a number of news items that have caught my attention over the last month: YouTube finally evolves out of the computer room, NASA uses yet more tricks to get us excited about their missions, making money with Flash and JavaScript everywhere (this last one is for techies). It’s just a small sampling of what’s happening.
Sometimes you guys surprise me. Again I hear discussion on turning off comments on blogs, but I love your comments. I want to receive more! Especially if they lead me to sites like VRtifacts. A site on everything that Virtual Reality was. All the promises it once held, but that never came to fruition. It’s the story of yet one more bubble, explained by some one with a lot of artifacts.
Two weeks ago I discovered that Wesabe will shut down at the end of July. Wesabe was the tool I used to track and budget my expenses. Without as much as an e-mail, the Wesabe owners decided to give us a one month notice. Some promises for more export tools were made, but have not yet materialized. Considering the value of the data that they kept, I must say I am thoroughly disappointed. Obviously, if you run out of money, there’s not much you can do, but still, a business plan might have been a wise investment.
Anyway, I’m not here to discuss the potential pitfalls of cloud services. I’ve been there and others have done it better. I’m here to show you the way out that I took. I exported everything to Excel. I used the PearBudget spreadsheet and used the Excel to set everything up. Sadly I haven’t yet figured out an easy way to import existing data, but at least I now have a backup of everything that was on Wesabe.
You might not notice it, but this is the first post written on the 3.0 version of WordPress. The fact that you’re not noticing, is testimony for how smooth the upgrade went. Obviously I didn’t upgrade to keep the exact same blog. There are some big enhancements that will enable a bunch of ideas I’ve been wanting to implement.
As part of an application I’m working on, I’d like to create documents in PDF format. I’ve mentioned this before, but it wasn’t until last weekend that I actually got started implementing my solution. The solution consists of generating HTML documents, exporting them to Google Docs and finally, exporting that newly created document to a PDF. Sounds complicated, but it turns out it was actually fairly easy.
… is to write a program. So in my quest to study Python, I was looking for something to create. Enter JayIsGames’s Casual Gameplay Design Competition, previously mentioned and much loved. Sadly they only allow games that run in a browser, but that’s not going to hold me back. I’m going to jump that hurdle when it comes to it (I’ve already seen some possibilities)
download an example project