Posts Tagged ‘ Computing ’

The zen of backup theory

When stuck inside due to all the snow, there is no better time to consider the topic of backup. Seriously, backup is important and the issue is fascinating.  The area of backup brings together so many topics in computing. Think about it! To do backup successfully, you must deal with data transfer, data integrity validation, [ READ MORE ]

Cool Free/Open Source Software from Google

As has been spoken about endlessly (OStatic, OSnews), there is a great blog post from 0x1fff with many (started at 35, is now many more) open source projects from Google. In fact and indeed, there is some cool stuff on there. I knew about Caja and Protocol Buffers (wish there was a JS port of [ READ MORE ]

ES5 is finally here, JavaScript geeks rejoice!

So, earlier this week, it was announced that ECMAScript 5 has finally been released. This is a good thing and I caught the highlights on InfoQ. The full draft is a 252 page PDF  beast of a document which covers basically about everything there is to cover. The things which strike me as interesting are [ READ MORE ]

Messing with OpenStreetMap

Some people might not see the reason for a project like OpenStreetMap when there are plenty of good mapping products and services laying around. I am not one of them. Whenever I use a GPS, I think quite a bit about it’s inner workings. How does it figure out which route is best? How does [ READ MORE ]

Data visualization on a web page

Quickie: Two of my favorite ways to get data visualized on a web page are the Google Chart API and flot, the amazing canvas-based plotting library built on top of jQuery. The Google Chart API provides a rediculously clever way to get high-quality information graphics which are generated on the back of the clearly-amazing Google [ READ MORE ]

Good talk about DSL construction in JS

Neat talk, should remind everyone about the joys of doing cool stuff in the browser. Plus, it made me think about DSLs in general which is good because of all the Scala goodness I’ve been messing around with recently. The talk is on Info[ READ MORE ]

Thoughts on different types of data

At work, my title is the Data Warehouse Manager. Mostly, I work with numbers. Lots of test scores, checklist data, compositve variables and the like. Numbers are cool and they can often yield plenty of insight. However, numbers are not the only story that can be told! So much of business intelligence right now focuses [ READ MORE ]

Podcasts I now listen to

I commute to work. Unfortunately, there is no way to carpool so I end up driving about 80 miles a day alone. Still, I drive a very fuel-efficient Honda Fit and try not to feel too guilty about the fuel consumption considering that I use very little. So, with all that time spent on the [ READ MORE ]

Getting somewhere with Scala

Ok, so when beginning with Scala, it was hard to figure certain things out. For example, what’s the best way to document my code? How should I go about testing my new programs? Which race in StarCraft best represents the ideals of Scala? Well, to prevent other people from getting stuck on these, I am [ READ MORE ]

Fun with case classes in Scala

Recently, I have been messing around with the Scala programming language. In particular, I am seriously considering purchasing the Lift Book (buy it for me and I’ll cook you something) because the Lift framework itself is so neat.  Though I’d like to see a few small features added to the language, I am very impressed [ READ MORE ]

About

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Jonathan E. Magen is a passionate developer who loves cooking and writing clean code. Star Trek is cool, too. Also, books. Many things are actually really great and Jonathan likes them as well.

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