10.05.13

Make ShareThis “Chicklets” Look All the Same

Posted in Blogroll, News, Tech at 3:36 am by Liv

I’ve written before on my blog about ShareThis — I do love their WordPress plugin and their analytics provide some interesting insights into my blog traffic. There is however a niggly little thing which has been bugging me for a while — and it’s all to do with the way their “chicklets” look. (If you’re not familiar with the ShareThis lingo, chicklets are those bubbles with numbers in them which show you how many times a certain piece of content has been shared per channel — e.g. Twitter, Facebook etc.)

If you are like me, always in a rush to produce the content rather than customize it (in other words, don’t want to spend too much time setting up your blog and want to dedicate most of the time to actually writing “stuff”), then you probably took the same steps to install the ShareThis plugin, accepted the defaults and then enable it. Trouble is if you do that, the chicklets by default don’t have a uniform/standard look, and you probably spotted different colors and styles being used — which gives the content a bit of a messy and disorganized look.

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01.05.13

Couchbase Graph/Stats Problem?

Posted in Blogroll, News, Tech at 6:44 am by Liv

This is just something that we found recently in Cognitive Match and I thought it might help others who use Couchbase as a NoSQL store, and rely on some of their (otherwise awesome!) graphs, as it seems these can be occasionally misleading — though this is probably an edge case.

A bit of background: we use Couchbase for some of our data stores in our serving solution in Cognitive Match; the particular data that gets stored in Couchbase gets updated frequently and even more frequently it gets read, however, due to the application architecture, an “eventual consistency” approach to updating this data is fine from our app point of view, and we don’t run complex queries to retrieve the data — just simple “get” operations. And since speed in important when reading the data (and we are ok with favouring reads versus writes/updates), Couchbase works great for us.

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18.04.13

Using Apache Commons CLI to Parse Arguments

Posted in Blogroll, Tech at 2:23 pm by Liv

I’ve talked before on this blog about Apache Commons CLI project and showcased how easy it is to use it to build a rather complex command-line syntax for your Java application. If you find yourself at any point writing an application which needs more than one command line switch, I strongly recommend Commons CLI is the way to go: it takes care of basic “syntax” validation, missing command-line parameters, help screens and so on, and all of this in exchange of pretty much providing a structured set of options describing the parameters expected / accepted by your application.

One of the problems when dealing with command-line arguments is that in a lot of cases the application needs to interpret these not as simple strings but parse them in some different data types and interpret them as numbers, file names, url’s etc. A classic example is specifying the max heap space when starting a Java process:

Java -Xmx512m ...

In the above case, the Java process needs to interpret the argument after -Xmx as a number followed by a “denominator” (e.g. kilobytes, megabytes etc) — as such will employ a process of extracting the digits in a separate string, parsing them, ensure they are a valid number, then separately identify the denominator (“m” in this case), ensure it’s a valid one and find the multiplier (megabytes in this case – i.e. 1024 X 1Kb) and based on these 2 finally compute the final result.

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08.04.13

First Californian Car

Posted in Blogroll, Fun Time, News, Photos at 1:17 pm by Liv

Well I guess it had to happen after all this time — went and got myself my first car in California:

And this is how much this piece of rubble cost 

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08.03.13

What Most Schools Don’t Teach…

Posted in Blogroll, Random Thoughts, Tech at 9:44 pm by Liv

If you work in IT, you have probably by now have seen the famous video on YouTube labelled “What most schools don’t teach” — where Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and a few other prominent figures are talking about how easy it is to program, and how only 10% of the USA schools teach programming. It goes on more to bombard the viewer with some scary figures about how 1,000,000 jobs or more will go unfilled because there are not enough coders — I’m guessing as a motivational message to inspire people (kids?) to start programming.

The thing is, watching the video, I cannot but cringe at the hypocrisy employed in making this video! If the purpose of this message is to increase education efforts (at school level or individually) in the programming sector, then I’d say it probably does it job — in a very lame way, but it sort of does. If however this is intended to be a call to arms for “everyone” to start programming and either change their jobs to a programming job or if they are at the beginning of their career, to set their career path to be in programming, then I’d say the message is a hypocritical one. Even worse, it is setting up the targeted audience for a harsh comedown!

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