Blog Insights

A while ago I was asked, as a pre-interview task for another company, to write some code in any language that counted word frequencies in these newsgroup articles. I recently came across the Ruby and Scala scripts I wrote and thought it would be fun to post them. First, here is...

It seems the Black Screen of Death has struck again. Microsoft isn't confirming or denying that the issue was caused by a Microsoft update, but this issue is not new to Windows users. It affects all breeds of Windows OS, after logging in the screen goes black. Some users are...

First off, lets get some test files: for i in foo bar cat dog ; do echo $i > $i ; done; This creates 4 files named  foo, bar, cat and dog. Each file has a single line that contains the file's own name. Let's open the first file: vim foo This would be the...

While searching through quotes to include in our company newsletter, I came across this: Read that again... The mind is a very powerful thing. For example, I don’t believe I’m the only one to experience being in a store next to a visibly sick individual and after they sneeze I start to...

I recently had to implement a common feature across multiple applications and app servers, all of which point to the same Oracle database. For reasons unrelated, I chose to implement this feature using PL/SQL. You can all stop laughing now. I ended up with something resembling: create or replace package body...

If you're a nerd like most of us here at Source Allies, you probably think robots are cool. One of the most important part of robotics is teaching the robot to find its location on a geographic map - a process known as "localization." One such algorithm for solving this...

Who am I to argue?...

Everyone, especially project managers, is in love with Agile Development. And why wouldn't they be? Under the old school system, you'd end up with developers either sitting around uselessly, or drafting up prototypes that will only be thrown away. Agile allows for parallel design and development, wasting less time and...

Need to sort a list of custom objects? Instead of coding up a custom implementation of your favorite sorting algorithm, you can simply use the tools provided in the Collections class (Collections framework) paired with the BeanComparator class (Apache project). Simple example: you have a List of Person objects and you...

After several weeks of performing support duties at a larger company I have begun to wonder about support practices and what could make the process better. The process in which I currently work goes as follows: It seems like there might be a quicker option. My responsibilities include monitoring all the tickets that...