Author Archives: carson

Faceted Search With Sphinx

By | Published: May 18, 2010
I decided to use the Sphinx search engine for the GeeQe iPhone app I build last year because it was fast and had a very small memory footprint. Recently I wanted to experiment with a search interface that had facets and wondered if I would need to move away from Sphinx to something like Solr. [...]
Posted in programming | Tagged , | 1 Comment

How to Create iPad Formatted Videos Using HandBrake or FFMpeg

By | Published: April 13, 2010
This is for those who may want to load a video onto their iPad with iTunes that isn't in the correct format. I needed to do this because I was trying to put an iTunes University video on my iPad a couple days ago and iTunes complained that it wasn't in the correct format for [...]
Posted in meta | Tagged , , , | 23 Comments

iPad Streaming Video and More

By | Published: April 6, 2010
I've updated the configuration examples in the open source segmenter project to reflect Apple's recommended stream bitrates for iPad video streaming, added a few fixes and a few new features. If you are interested in streaming video on the iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch and haven't done so yet you it may help to start [...]
Posted in programming | Tagged , , , | 20 Comments

Using Cursors with PHP MySQLi and Multiple Prepared Statements

By | Published: March 30, 2010
After my post on using PHP MySQLi and multiple prepared statements at the same time someone commented that using cursors could do the same thing. With that comment I dug some more and found that modifying the cursor type that is used under the covers will indeed let you execute multiple prepared statements concurrently on [...]
Posted in programming | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Spring 3 File Upload Example

By | Published: March 22, 2010
I had the opportunity to figure out how to do file uploads using Spring 3 the other day and I couldn't find anything that pulled it all together. What follows is a complete example of how to do MVC based file uploads with Spring 3.
Posted in programming | Tagged , , | 12 Comments

Parsing the SXSW Twitter Stream for Fun

By | Published: March 10, 2010
Over the weekend I decided to toss together a simple twitter stream monitoring app that would capture SXSW tweets. I wanted to build on some of what I learned while hacking together the stuff for code2009 and it was also an excuse to play with node.js and a few other things. I figured I would [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Using Daemon-Kit and RobustThread to Build Ruby Daemons

By | Published: March 2, 2010
On a number of occasions I have found myself needing to assemble a daemon process for some type or processing done using Ruby. Each time I roll things a little different and I finally started to wonder if someone had already put together tools for doing the daemon parts. After some quick digging I ran [...]
Posted in programming | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Building HipHop PHP for Fedora 12 on 64 bit and 32 bit Systems

By | Published: February 23, 2010
Now that Facebook has finally released the source for HipHop PHP it is time to give it a spin. Of course it is still a little rough around the edges so I figured I would toss together a quick howto on getting it to build. The first thing to note is that they are only [...]
Posted in programming | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Fedora 12 Bootable Root EBS on EC2

By | Published: February 16, 2010
I recently needed to create a clean EC2 AMI using a fairly new linux distro. It has been a while since I've needed to create a new AMI so I also wanted to move away from the older pre-packaged AMI and boot using EBS. After taking a look at what was currently available publicly I [...]
Posted in system administration | Tagged , , | 27 Comments

PHP MySQLi and Multiple Prepared Statements

By | Published: February 9, 2010
While sprucing up the PHP code I use to provide my own Stack Overflow API for GeeQe I ran into an error caused by trying to use multiple prepared statements with MySQLi. It turned up when I tried to execute one prepared statement while looping over the result set from another prepared statement that were [...]
Posted in programming | Tagged , , | 4 Comments