Java Thinking

MyOnlineProfile.net  has launched - as a Google  AppEngine  application. MyOnlineProfile lets you catalog your public online profiles in one place - leaving you with just one link to give your friends and one link in your email signature. I first wrote MyOnlineProfile as a  Grails  application - its a small application at the moment, so it didn't take long. However I did over-engineer it. I made the classic mistake of trying to solve the wrong problems and over-optimising. Luckily with being a small application and written with such a productive framework, I'm only talking about wasting hours rather than months. I deployed it to my Linux VPS, but unfortunately,  Java  based applications take up quite a bit of resources just starting up and memory on a VPS costs money (recurring money). So there just wasn't room for it. Hence re-writing it in  Python  for AppEngine. Being exposed to Python has been good for me - and relatively easy since  Groovy  opened my mind signi

If you want to convert from Flash to AVI (on linux) there is a good script here . It uses mencoder to convert files specified on the command line to XVID or DIVX - files are created using the same filename, but with an avi extension.

I am using prototype in a Google Appengine project, and while it worked on my development machine, after deploying it onto the Google infrastructure prototype wasn't parsing the JSON responses anymore. In my code, I was returning the JSON in the response text (as opposed to using X-JSON response header). The Content-Type response header was set as application/json and my javascript code used Ajax.Request() with the parameter evalJSON:true so as to parse the response text. Running locally with the dev_appserver.py everything worked okay. However when running the deployed app, the Content-Type header was no longer being set - meaning that prototype would never parse the response text. I'm not sure why Content-Type doesn't get set when running on the Google infrastructure yet it works on the development server. But, luckily when using Ajax.Request, you can specify evalJSON:'force' so that prototype parses the response regardless of the content-type. Server ajax respons

It frequently surprises me when seemingly simple things are missing from mature products. For example, Oracle doesn't have a boolean type. Strange but apparently true. Never mind, this article describes how to work around this.

The files Mythtv records are saved with a timestamp as a file name, making it pretty hard to figure out which file is which. To easily identify the files, you can use mythrename.pl - I couldn't find it in my Mythbuntu installation, so I had to download it from http://svn.mythtv.org/svn/trunk/mythtv/contrib/user_jobs/ . It ran okay, without any dependency problems. This post has some useful comments on how to run it. The idea is that you can schedule it with cron to run at regular intervals so as to stay current. I'm running it so it doesn't actually rename the original files, but it makes sensibly named symbolic links to the originals: mythrename.pl --format "\%T/\%Y-\%m-\%d \%H\%i \%- \%T \%-\%S" --link /home/paul/TVShows For help with the options, see the wiki page or run with the --help option.