A review of O'Reilly's Mastering Grails 101 video series by Berglund and McCullough. Covers Grails fundamentals, Groovy language basics, convention over configuration philosophy, building applications from scratch, and scaffolding. Recommends for anyone wanting to learn Grails web framework quickly.

Updated code for pulling World of Warcraft character data from Battle.net's new REST API returning JSON. Includes solutions in Ruby using HTTParty, Groovy with JSON slurper, and CoffeeScript running on Node.js, replacing older XML-based approaches that broke when Battle.net upgraded their armory.

Solving Project Euler problem 001 in multiple programming languages to maintain skills. The problem asks for sum of all multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000. Includes solutions in JavaScript (both original and ES6), Ruby, Groovy, and Python, with plans to add Clojure solutions for cross-language functional programming practice.

Step-by-step guide for installing Groovy and Grails on Mac OS X with symbolic links for easy upgrades. Covers downloading binary releases, moving to /usr/share, creating symbolic links to simplify version changes, updating .profile with GROOVY_HOME and GRAILS_HOME environment variables and PATH settings, and verifying installation.

Code examples for generating MD5 hashes in three programming languages. Shows both quick one-line hashing and the update method for hashing large data in chunks. Notes about using SHA-1 with salt instead of MD5 for password storage to prevent rainbow table attacks.

Demonstrates how to parse poorly formatted HTML using Groovy with TagSoup library to handle errors. Example code pulls NFL passing statistics from nfl.com by parsing HTML tables and converting them to structured data, with plans to push to a NoSQL database.

A review of the top three blog posts of 2010 based on Google Analytics: Fun with ZFS send and receive for powerful filesystem commands, Stopping SSH Brute Force attacks with PF for server security, and Pulling data from Warcraft Armory with Groovy which gained attention from the Groovy community including Project Manager Guillaume Laforge.

Preparing for a 22-hour flight to New Zealand and Australia by loading up on ebooks from ThriftEBooks. Focusing on Manning Publications' "Groovy in Action" and "Grails in Action" to gain expertise for demonstrating rapid web application development with Grails at work.

A Groovy port of Java code for generating website screenshots. Uses JTidy to convert HTML to XHTML and the Flying Saucer renderer to output PNG images, demonstrating how to programmatically capture thumbnails of websites for archiving or preview purposes.

A Groovy function demonstrating how to replace high-level Unicode characters with their HTML entity equivalents. The entitize function iterates through a string, converting characters with code points above 127 to numeric character references like € for the Euro symbol, useful for HTML/XML output.

A Groovy script demonstrating how to use the StopForumSpam API to check email addresses against a database of known spammers. The script reads emails from a text file, queries the API, and reports how many times each email has been reported, showcasing Groovy's concise syntax for API integration.

A Groovy script demonstrating how to pull and parse character data from the World of Warcraft Armory. Uses XMLSlurper to fetch guild information and extract level 80 characters grouped by class, showcasing Groovy's cleaner syntax compared to Ruby for XML processing.