Making eclipse Kepler and Luna work on Ubuntu

This is a «note to self and to anyone that could need it» post. I’ve had troubles with Eclipse with some Ubuntu installations for some time. I even have had switched to other IDEs, but now I «needed» some plugins that exists for eclipse, so I decided to try to make it work. The problem has been that it either just hangs (OpenJDK 7) or crashes (Oracle JDK 7) after 4 seconds.

Round, Floor and Ceiling in Expression Language

Expression Language makes working with Java Server Pages a slightly less pain in the behind. But, its functionality is very limited, there is for instance no way to round off a number, neither as floor, ceiling or to the closest integer ?View Code JAVA Floor(foo) -> ${foo - ( foo % 1 ) } Ceiling(foo) -> ${foo + ( 1 - (foo%1)) % 1} Round(foo) -> ${foo +0.

[1 of 3] Updating your brightkite location using Google latitude

BrightKite is a service, much like twitter actually, but that uses your location to find interesting stuff. It could be a great tool to create ad-hoc gatherings of some group of people, for instance coders. If there were a lot of BrightKite users in Bergen for instance, I could leave a message on brightkite that I and some other Python coders were going for a beer at Henriks, and that any others that is interested could join if they wanted, together with the GPS coordinates for Henriks.

PHP frustration

Most of the code I’ve written in my life so far has been PHP, as long as I include all the small testing of different stuff just to see if it could be done. PHP is quick to prototype stuff in, because you quickly get something you can poke around with, there’s little boilerplate code. However, specially when I’m just hacking together something in a hurry, theres one thing that’s really, really frustrating.

Flickr shortcode (and some nice HDR photos)

I like using creative commons photos from flickr as illustrations on my blog, however, I find it tedious to add all the metadata to satisfy the BY directive in the creative commons license in a consistent manner. Then it’s really nice that flickr has an API where I can automatically fetch that information. I use the shortcode feature of wordpress, so I can use ?View Code PHP [flickr url=”

Merging two lists

Lets say you have two lists, one of them containing the values [1,2,3] and the other one containing the values [4,5,6], and you want to combine these two lists into one list, like this one: [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Let’s see how this can be done in different (high level) programming (or scripting or templating) languages. Java Java has multiple list implementations, lets start with the most basic one, the builtin array.

Blogging code

As a programmer and linux geek I often need, or at least want to write about code, scripts and commands on my blog, but as many of you know, displaying raw code in HTML is setting yourself up for failure. The simplest part of the problem is the fact that line breaks and whitespace might be significant, this is simply solved by putting the code inside a block. The more tricky part is that code often is full of characters like &, > and <.

Unreadable code

If you’re really trying, you will always be able to write completely unreadable code in any programming language. All the language designers attemts to force you to write readable code, and even making it so the easiest way ahead, even for quick hacks is to write it as readable and reusable code will fail if you’re really trying to write unreadable code. This guy is obviously concerned about “job security”. (not the blog author, but the code author)

Static typing VS. Unit tests

Okay. It’s kind of stupid to put static typing up against Unit tests. Even so, lots of people does so a lot of times in the discussion between dynamic and static programming languages.

Static typing provides you with a security net when it comes to typos. Alhough, it doesn’t give you any security against logical errors.

the right tool for the job

So, you’re going to parse a webpage, to extract some information. For instance if you want to get the tracking information for your last online order, and you want to display the tracking information changes using growl, dbus notifications or xosd.

You know regular expressions, so you go to the job with your long range missiles ready. But wait a minute, you’ll probably solve the problem but is regular expressions really the right tool?

The pro for regular expressions is that you can use the same tool you always use for parsing jobs, but then again you doesn’t learn anything new out of this. You might fortify your position as regex wizard even more, but how about something completely different?

Now. Most webpages is written in HTML, and some even in XHTML, for HTML documents languages like Python has a built-in parser, after the model of the SAX-parser. (It’s probably the other way around, the SAX parser is built on the base of the HTML parser…) Most programming languages has good support for XML, so for XHTML documents, you can use the HTML-parser, a SAX-parser or even the XML-DOM parsers.

The benefit of doing it this way is that your parser will probably be more robust to minor changes in the webpage. You don’t reinvent the wheel (The best way I’ve found to parse HTML documents using regular expressions is to make a specialized SAX-like parser anyway). Your code will probably be readable in a year, and others might even be able to understand your code. And finally, you learn something new, which might give you a fresh view on a lot of problems.

Now back to the original issue, to make a parser for the parcel tracking of your postal service. Here’s an example parsing the shipment tracking page of posten, the norwegian postal service.