New York City Subway Route Finder With Google Maps
Watch out Hopstop! I wrote a Graph lib in python along with heuristic hSLD A* search and brought it to life with google maps and Ajax. The library is running as a json-rpc service with mod_python. The next step is to use geocoding api to turn street addresses to lat and lon coordinates and integrate it to find starting and ending stations, fun fun fun.
Maybe Ill put this on google app engine if I get alot of hits.
http://www.dancygier.com/main/subway
Posted at 02:13AM Dec 11, 2008 by AaronD in General | Comments[0]
SOAP hell
When did soap and perl become so difficult. Using it as a server is a complete pain. SOAP::Lite was cutting edge 5 years ago. Its just a bit behind with the evolving wsdl standards. So I decided to use XML-RPC, its all I really need and interopability with other languages should be simpler. This is the main reason why I'm using web services to begin with.
Speaking of the XML RPC cpan modules. RPC::XML works well but the documentation is lacking. You have to putz around to get anything to work. add_method() is especially poorly documented. Much guessing and the perl debugger helped me get the syntax correct:) It would be great if there was Apache2 integration ... But I shouldn't complain it actually works and works well.
Posted at 12:29AM Oct 11, 2008 by AaronD in General | Comments[0]
Excellent Systems Programming Book
My background with unix is interesting. Everyone who gets involved with unix gets there one of a handful of ways. My primary introduction into the unix realm was through perl. Although perl runs on many architectures and os's. There is no doubt that the two are tightly coupled. Many of the built in perl modules and functions take there name directly from there unix/c origins Fcntl -> fcntl.h, opendir, read etc. The c connections are apparent under the hood. But most of us happily don't take the time to dive in deeper and really see whats happening under the hood. For those that want to gain a much deeper understanding of unix, unix systems programming, system calls low level io, devices, drivers, the unix file system, pipes, processes, posix threads you really would stand to gain from reading Bruce Molay's Understanding Unix/Linux Programming. It is really very well written. The author presents things in a consistent way and really gets the reader to think by providing interesting non trivial examples. It will change the way you think about everything you do on a unix box. In a day when many of us use dynamic languages (perl, python, ruby) or languages like java which try to abstract everything away from a person till he knows nothing, this is an eye opener. This book will get you in touch with your machine again and hopefully help fill in the blanks.
Posted at 09:12PM Aug 16, 2008 by AaronD in Unix/Linux | Comments[0]
Django Template System
Django is so easy to use. It was clearly well thought out. The url handling is fantastic but, what steals the show is the object oriented templating system. I'm sure I haven't even scratched the surface. This is making building web apps clean and fun.[Read More]
Posted at 03:03AM Jul 26, 2008 by AaronD in Python | Comments[0]
Dancygier.com 2.0!
dancygier.com relaunch! I finally got around to redoing my website. Not that it was much more than a nice image gallery. I'm running apache2 on the front with mod_perl, mod_python and svn. Backend tomcat is serving roller. Stay tuned.[Read More]
Posted at 10:22PM Mar 15, 2008 by AaronD in Status | Comments[0]