Jeff.Robbins.ws » Programming

Nothing like those ole’ midnight deploys

jeffro — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 04:24:53 +0000

…*sigh, yeah, that what I am doing right now. Pining for midnight, fingers itching to hit the send button on the email to the admins to deploy the tag to the production servers. 57…58…59…MIDNIGHT, rock and fire!

Now I just wait while the admins do their things, and watch the ‘The web site is down’ alert messages from our hyperactive monitoring software. Yeah, thanks Chip..

Whee, the app is back online. QA … go get ‘em

Hollywood style code hacking

jeffro — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 15:50:16 +0000

Hey kids! Have you ever wanted to pursue a career in programming? Checkout this site to see EXACTLY what its like! Just click the ‘Hack!’ button and start typing, you’ll be hacking Linux kernel code before you even realize what you are doing. Isn’t programming fun!

Google CSE article

jeffro — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 01:40:11 +0000

I just finished the Google CSE article I started a couple of weeks back. It was an interesting project, mostly due to the fact that I have never worked with the Google search API before and it was enjoyable to learn something new.

Hopefully you find it useful. When I was putting the code together, I found there to be a distinct lack of articles or documentation on the Custom Search Engines. Hopefully this helps someone. Then again, Google will probably EOL the JS CSE API in the next few months and I will have written the article for my own benefit. Ah well..

Check it out here

Do you ever get the feeling?

jeffro — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 17:16:12 +0000

I have been working to implement a Google custom search engine into a clients website. I have had to pour through the documentation to fully understand how it works and I am both impressed and revolted simultaneously. I keep getting the feeling that this stuff was originally developed by people that are obscenely smarter than I am. Its obviously brilliant, but like any brilliance, its usually offset by some other glaring omission.

First off, the search API from Google. Why is the primary search API deprecated and the recommended replacement not even out of labs yet? So let me get this straight, I can either use the API that will EOL’d at some unknown time by Google without warning, or I can use the unstable labs API that could and most likely will change in the future. Sounds like a call from the client complaining that their site is broken just waiting to happen.

Second, the API is written in a way that leaves massive holes of undocumented functionality. Usually when you document an API you include ALL the functionality so people can fully utilize all the features. So I am continually finding blogs and other bastions of literary excellence revealing ‘hidden’ features of the Google search API. I have implemented a fair amount of the code I have found on these sites and I am still flabbergasted as to why Google would just leave this stuff out of their documentation.

I am going to be writing up an article on implementing a Google custom search engine over the next few days, one, so I can remember if I have to do it again in the future, good documentation is sparse on this subject, and two so others can refer to it and hopefully avoid some of the frustration I have gone through to get this to work.

Set a static column value in a SQL Server query

jeffro — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 00:49:26 +0000

I needed a quick way to put a default value in a select query for MS SQL Server 2000. Sure there are plenty of ways I can do it programmatically after I have the resultset, but there wasn’t going to be any intermediate step. I was querying directly to an export file so I needed to have everything in one place. There were some columnar values that were required but we didn’t have any good data to put into the column. Here is what I did, ‘MyDefaultValue’ would be the static column value, in case you were wondering:

DECLARE @x CHAR(1)
SET @x=1
 
SELECT
        myColumn1,
        myColumn2,
        CASE @x WHEN 1 THEN 'MyDefaultValue' END AS [myColumn3]
FROM 
        myDatabase