Category Archive: programming

Mar 19

Pi on a Pi Followup

The particular algorithm used in calculating Pi is one which converges to Pi as you add terms; it’s not calculating out to a number of digits, although I might try that one as well at some point. Here’s the output from a run; it’s interesting how it gets closer and closer, but… Another interesting thing …

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Mar 17

Pi on a Pi for Pi Day

EDIT: The metrics below are skewed. Not all JVM’s are created equal. For updated metrics on the Pi, please see JVM Choice Matters (a lot!). What better thing to do on Pi Day than to calculate Pi? I figured while I’m at it, I might as well do some performance testing of the Raspberry Pi …

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Feb 25

Grabbing Titles & URLs with a Bookmarklet

The following is fixing the wrong problem, but often technology is easier than people problems. $WORK removed the ability to use plugins with Chrome without having to go through a bureaucratic process lasting weeks. One tool I’ve found useful is the ability to copy the title and link of a page to the clipboard and …

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Feb 12

Developer Personality

DZone is conducting a survey of Developer Personality Types along the lines of a Meyers-Briggs analysis. They plan to shortly release the results, but will leave the “quiz” up after. If you’re curious about your developer type, you can take it at: Full Personality Test Short Personality Test Here’s my results from the full test …

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Sep 01

Fractal Terrain Generation

Our map

I’ve been working on a wargaming library/framework off and on for over a year; along the way I’ve encountered a number of interesting problems to solve. This blog entry details one of them, fractal terrain generation.

Oct 08

Semantic Web

I have been doing some site scraping of late.  And as a result, I have really come to appreciate the semantic web.  It’d make life infinitely easier for grabbing data.  Of course there are other, better reasons for using the semantic web, but right now, it’d make a difference in my life.

Sep 22

JRuby + jmx4r + rrd4j == Easy reporting on app servers (part I)

Portion of a JConsole screen

This is a how-to for using jmx and rrd4j, a java implementation of rrdtool, to report on app server statistics. Thanks to Jeff Mesnil(author of jmx4r), Werner Schuster (JMX the Ruby way with jmx4r), sishen (JRobin sucks), and the rrd4j team. You’ll need the following: JVM 1.5 or higher — JRE is not enough, you …

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Sep 22

JRuby to check connectivity…

I had an issue reported by a developer where their jboss connection pool wasn’t working properly. It looked good to me, so I decided to verify that everything worked in so far as connectivity from the box. So, I used the following jruby script to help:

Sep 12

Class is Class, and Instance, Instance, and never the twain shall meet

More about methods, it’s inspired/spurred by a comment on methods, public_methods, and private_methods by Pit Captain. It also corrects some misconceptions I had (and may have (wrongly) given others). I’ve added a new category, “eating crow” for this and any other postings where I step back and re-evaluate my posts. This is to keep me …

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Sep 11

methods, public_methods, and private_methods

Ruby’s Object has a method, methods. You can use it to see the methods which an object has. Sort of. In this post I’m examining methods, public_methods, and private_methods as well as some of their implications.

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