http://www.laranevans.com Custom software development Mon, 25 May 2009 15:34:36 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Peanut Butter slices. A clever invention. Took 4 years to figure out from what I hear. But, this falls into "inventions I really don't need". http://www.laranevans.com/2009/05/25/peanut-butter-slices/ I had some issues yesterday trying to use some Pear libraries in a web app. So, I checked my Pear config: me:ZendServer laran$ pear config-show Configuration (channel pear.php.net): ===================================== Auto-discover new Channels auto_discover Default Channel ... http://www.laranevans.com/2009/05/12/configuring-zendserver-to-use-pear-on-osx-105/ Most of the top Google matches having to do with Rails and ActionMailer relate to older versions which are different than ActionMailer in Rails 2.2.2. To get correct documentation go straight to the source, the Rails wiki page on Mailers. http://www.laranevans.com/2009/04/08/rails-actionmailer-the-right-way/ They're so much the same! It's like a couple of hundred different people had the same idea and chose to build the same system in their own language of choice. Some of these people had (or were themselves) good graphic designers. Those people built relatively professional looking Web sites and ... http://www.laranevans.com/2009/04/08/whats-missing-from-bug-and-task-tracking/ Amazon recently announced the availability of Hadoop based MapReduce capabilities on their EC2 compute cloud. This is amazing. A fair amount of the work I did in the Cornell Web Lab was exactly in this vein. We had to muck around with all sorts of issues at the time however related ... http://www.laranevans.com/2009/04/07/hadoop-based-mapreduce-on-amazon-ec2/ I get plenty of spam-ish newsletters from technology groups. There is only one newsletter that I read religiously, InfoQ. InfoQ is, in my opinion, one of the best sources for information about what's going in the technology space. The interviews and reviews they provide I find truly informational and well worth ... http://www.laranevans.com/2009/04/07/infoq-the-essential-source-for-technology-news/ I ran through a couple of different techniques for installing Magento on Dreamhost. I tried the Downloader. I tried a command-line technique. But, by far, the easiest technique was to use the Bash script installer. All you have to do is create your database before running the script and you'll be ... http://www.laranevans.com/2009/04/05/installing-magento-on-dreamhost-the-easy-way/ I found some great code samples recently on www.java2s.com. Lots of stuff there for numerous programming languages and all sorts of libraries, APIs, etc. http://www.laranevans.com/2009/03/24/great-source-for-sample-code/ General Everything(!) is an object if __name__ == '__main__': Collections Dictionaries use squiqqly brackets Lists use square brackets Tuples use parens Dictionaries Basic syntax is foo{'bar':'baz'} foo['bar'] del foo['bar'] to delete foo.clear() to clear foo.keys() returns a list (need the parens) foo.values() returns a list Lists Basic syntax is li = ['a','b','c','d','e'] li[0] li[-1] is OK (gets the last element in the list) Slicing li[1:3] is ['b','c'] li[1:-1] is ['b','c','d'] So this ... http://www.laranevans.com/2009/03/24/learning-python-hour-1/ Learning your first programming language is a challenge. All of the concepts are new. The syntax is foreign. What you end up with is a jumble of things that you don't quite know how to do. You may get the concepts right, but get the syntax wrong. The result is ... http://www.laranevans.com/2009/03/24/programming-language-learning-as-an-experienced-developer/