I just got done watching “Mastering Grails 101” from O’Reilly last night. I enjoyed the presenters, having gone to many No Fluff Just Stuff talks of theirs. I know they are knowledgeable in many of the technologies in the Java ecosystem. Also they both have been in another video from O’Reilly, “Master Git” which I talked about before. I bought the videos because Grails is a framework that really interests me because I work with a good number of Java technologies.

I haven’t been playing World of Warcraft for a bit, but I guess they did some big updates to the armory which stopped the code I had written before from running correctly. (Link to the old code, Ruby and Groovy) After looking in to what has changed, I found out they added a new REST API for Battle.net which lets you pull data easily without the need of tricking the server to pass you XML.

Made this posting sometime ago but I’ve been forgetting to actually post it. When I was looking up some information on Scala I found a great video tutorial on youtube made by MadocDoyu, which can be found here. In part of the video he introduces the Project Euler, this project seems really interesting. I plan on solving problems time to time using many of the languages I have looked at. I’m hoping this will keep my skills in these languages up to date.

Just some steps to get people up and running with Groovy/Grails on Mac OS. Hopefully with this steps you will be able to easily upgrade to any new version that comes out. Keep in mind you will need to replace the version number that is part of the file names as they upgrade. Download the newest releases of Groovy and Grails, Groovy can be found at http://groovy.codehaus.org/, and as I’m writing this the Stable Release is 1.

Hopping around from languages to languages, its easy to forget how to do something, nothing that a quick Google search can’t help with but I wanted to make this posting for myself to save some time. MD5 is used all over the place, its a one way hash that can be used for checking the integrity of files, storing passwords in databases and checking text being passed around. I do want to add a note here about using MD5 hashes for storing passwords in a database, I would start by looking at SHA-1 along with using salt this will help ensure if anyone gets a hold of your database they can just use rainbow table to workout the plain text of the password.

In a perfect world all the websites we would go to would be well formatted to the point that we could call them XHML so we could parse the data just like any other XML file but sadly this is not true. There is a lot of errors on pages that your browser fixes in the background or just simply overlooks due to HTML being so lose in its formatting structure.

Well, now that 2010 is over I would like to go back and look at my top 3 postings based on Google Analytics. I’m really not much of a writer as I’m sure you can tell from my postings, but I do want to be able to share whatever knowledge I have and I do hope this blog helps with that. I would love to hear from people that pop on to the site from a search and found some helpful info.

So looking over the times for my flight it seems that it takes about 22 hours to get to New Zealand from Boston and about the same to get back from Australia. 22 hours is a long time to be in one place….Well, not really one place, but sitting. So thanks to the great site, http://www.thriftebook.com I been loading up on ebooks to read on the trip. The 2 books I’m really looking forward to reading are Groovy in Action and Grails in Action both from Manning Publications Co.

For a project I needed to work out a way to make thumbnails/screenshots of HTML files for some Java code I was working on. From my research, I found a nice project called the The Flying Saucer Project which has an XML/XHTML/CSS 2.1 renderer which works for what I needed for my project. Taking the HTML files and using JTidy to make them in to XHTML the renderer could output an image file for me.

Not sure if ’entitize’ is the right term but it’s what people at my old job would call the process of taking high level characters and replacing them with the unicode. For example, € would be replaced with €. This was needed with some inhouse applications or dealing with output to HTML/XML to ensure it would show the right character to the users. Well, I needed to do this awhile ago and I looked up some old Python code that I had done before and re-wrote it in Groovy.