http://scottyallen.com Sat, 02 Aug 2008 03:54:16 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en ATMs are awesome.  Not only do they make money out of thin air, but they can make thin air out of a plastic card, at the most opportune moment. Let's say, hypothetically, that when I arrived in Bangkok Airport last night, that I decided to get some cash from an ATM.  ... http://scottyallen.com/archives/2008/08/01/why-atms-are-totally-awesome-machines/ Finally, I can talk about one of the cooler things to come out of Google in a while: Google App Engine. App Engine is an application hosting service at Google, where you can write apps in python using a very simple but powerful framework, and run them on Google's ... http://scottyallen.com/archives/2008/04/08/behind-the-scenes-developing-a-google-app-engine-demo/ So, I'm looking for a new place to live. My current place is ok, other than the fact that I have to wear earplugs in order not to be woken up by the guy upstairs talking on the phone or walking around, due to extremely thin floors. The process of ... http://scottyallen.com/archives/2008/03/04/apartment-hunting-aka-fun-with-yahoo-pipes-and-google-maps/ I read about the new Amazon S3 grid based storage web service today. Very cool stuff. The general gist is that they give you access to store and serve files from a large computing grid, at pennies on the dollar ($0.15/gig storage per month and $0.20/gig transfer). In a small ... http://scottyallen.com/archives/2006/03/15/5/ So, I've spent the better part of today trying to figure out how to get IE to always reload a particular page, even if the user gets there via the back button. There is some discrepancy between various browser vendors over seemingly conflicting portions of the HTTP 1.1 spec, namely ... http://scottyallen.com/archives/2006/01/04/causing-a-page-reload-on-the-back-button-in-ie/ Note to self: When running a web service that people depend on as part of their daily lives, being down for 8 hours at a stretch is not acceptable. Even if it's free. And if you do have a catastrophe, let your customers know as much information as possible, as ... http://scottyallen.com/archives/2005/12/18/on-down-time-and-web-services/ I'm finally finished packaging up JSDBI for public consumption. It's not too fancy yet, but the basic functionality is there. Download the code here JSDBI provides an easy to setup CRUD interface for REST web services. With a few lines of javascript, you can build a class which provides full ... http://scottyallen.com/archives/2005/12/03/jsdbi-001-beta/ So, my automatic REST interface generator for Catalyst is ready to go. It's pretty spiffy. You just run: script/myapp_create.pl controller REST::SomeTable Scaffold::Compiled CDBI::SomeTable and Bang! you have a REST interface for your model CDBI::SomeTable. Give it a shot. Download here. Feedback is more than welcome. JSDBI is on the ... http://scottyallen.com/archives/2005/11/03/catalysthelpercontrollerscaffoldrest/ I spent most of this evening banging my head against the wall, shaving one yak after another, trying to make headway on JSDBI. A full fledged yak shaving expedition. How to get Venkman to run on Firefox on Gentoo First off, I spent a fair amount of time trying to get Venkman, ... http://scottyallen.com/archives/2005/10/29/revelations-of-the-evening/ I've decided to temporarily name this Class::DBI meets ajax idea JSDBI, for lack of a better name (subject to change when I find something better). I've also sat down and translated the synposis example for Class::DBI into an equivalent JSDBI version. Code is after the jump. Also, crw pointed me ... http://scottyallen.com/archives/2005/10/27/some-sample-code-for-jsdbi/