If you have a database of zipcodes and their latitudes and longitudes, you can use a version of this query to get the geographically closest zipcodes: SELECT b.zipcode, b.city, b.state, b.latitude, b.longitude, ACOS(SIN(RADIANS(a.latitude)) * SIN(RADIANS(b.latitude)) + [...]

I’m mostly a Perl guy (with secret love of Javascript), so I try to stay out of the Python stuff at dayjob where possible. But recently I’ve been taking the lead on a bunch of Memcached optimizations, which are starting to trickle over into the Python side. A nice feature of the Perl Cache::Memcached module is [...]

Yesterday at work someone was trying to pass traditional Apache SSI directives through an XSL transformation on a Google search appliance. Long story short, they vanished: HTML comments don’t make it out of that device. Anyway…I had a simple solution. Since we were pumping the Google results through a Perl CGI anyway, there was no reason [...]

mod_perl 2 has an annoying…feature. Because the system environ struct is not thread safe, mod_perl’s perl-script handler unties the %ENV hash from the actual environment. That means, anything that uses the C getenv/setenv/unsetenv functions to read the environment will not see changes that were made to %ENV. An obvious example is Perl’s localtime function. It actually [...]

I’ve been using Memcached for a few weeks, trying to offload some VERY heavy database load. It’s nice and blazing fast, but the implementation is sort of clunky. If I have this simple bit of code: $key = "foobar"; $val = calculate_val($key); It turns into this: $key = "foobar"; $val = $memd->get($key); if(! defined($val)) { $val = calculate_val($key); $memd->set($key, [...]

Don't worry China...this is just to protect people. We're not going to shoot down your satellites. We could. But we won't. Honest.

Sort of sappy (particularly with the soundtrack), but as a parent, it rings true. Beware, believers in this: http://tinyurl.com/2f8gld

"If you think you can do better, why ain'cha rich?"