This is a Common Lisp code walkthrough for generating original jokes. You seed the generator with the knowledge about different objects, and it uses that vocabulary to generate unique jokes. All of the jokes are of the form: “What do you get when you cross X with Y?” This code was originally written for my CS288: An AI Approach to Natural Language Processing class at UC Berkeley in 2004. Read the rest of this entry »
Optimizing J2EE applications is hard. Even if all of your algorithms have been analyzed in big-O notation and finely tuned, you can have abysmal performance due to a poorly configured environment. J2EE applications depend on many lower layers which all must be properly optimized in order to give good overall performance. This page gives a checklist of optimization tips organized by layer. It includes optimizations for the HTTP Server, Application Server, Java frameworks, database, and the application itself. This page isn’t intended to be a comprehensive optimization guide; it is a checklist of the most effective optimizations I have found that can be applied in most situations. This checklist is a good place to start before more focused optimizations - and you may even find that nothing more is required.
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I was looking for a Wordpress plugin to spice up comments with custom avatars, but I didn’t find exactly what I was looking for. So I hacked together the Ravatar Wordpress plugin that will display a randomly generated avatar for each visitor. The icons are based on email, so a given visitor will get the same icon each time they comment. It’s totally customizable, so you can set it up with images that match your blog’s theme. Visitors can optionally choose their own avatar by setting up a Gravatar. Download the plugin here. Read the rest of this entry »
Every developer should have a collection of tools that at their disposal to facilitate project planning stages, speed development, automate testing and building, organize code versions, and otherwise make life easier. Here is a list of the standard tools in my toolbox that make me more productive. Almost all of them are F/OSS and multi-platform. This list has a slight Java slant, but most of these tools are language independent. Read the rest of this entry »
Apache Axis is an implementation of the SOAP protocol. It is a framework for constructing SOAP clients and servers. A Java client application is able to use a Web Service by calling Java stub classes created from WSDL files. These WSDL files are made availible by the SOAP server application. As an example, we will go through the process of creating a jar file from WSDLs using the Yahoo’s Enterprise Web Services (EWS). The EWS platform makes Yahoo’s Search Marketing API available. Read the rest of this entry »
