A few days ago I made use of a couple Oracle built in functions and it made me happy I didn't have to write a stored proc or some type of mini-app to do it. I needed to parse a timestamp out of a field that was put there by a java program. The timestamp was just the output of System.currentTimeInMillis() and was concatenated onto some other information.

It took a little digging to find out how to convert a epoch style timestamp but here it is:

Note that I convert the output from GMT to EDT here.

Tags: java, oracle

Java Concurrency in Practice

Threading in java is fairly easy and now with java 1.5 some of the stuff that was harder has become even easier. A few years ago someone pointed me to a site that had some concurrency utils that where the precursor to what are now the concurrent utils in java 1.5. They are very close in functionality and if you can't use java 1.5 the older version of the utils will work with older versions of java and give you a lot of the same functionality.

I'm going to give a quick thread pooling example using both the new and old concurrency utils. I picked the thread pooling out of both since that seems to be what I end up using the most out of all the new utilities. I may revisit this again at some point to go over the periodic executors or some of the other things I have used but just not as much.

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Techcrunch has a good review by Frank Gruber of the look and feel of mapping services. I think it is notable that ESRI's service is not included in the review. I think it is at least as good as the mapquest service. I may have to find time to redo my review of the acuracy of each again and a more technical evaluation of each.

Tags: gis, esri, geocode

I recently had an opportunity to use ESRI's ArcSDE again. It is a spatial database interface and in this instance I was using the java api. I wanted to change what used to be a query using a rectangle into a query using a circle. For some reason parts of the java api for ArcSDE require a C library or something. I gave up pretty quickly on trying to make their arc function work since the documentation wasn't very clear on how it worked. Instead I decided to figure out how to approximate a circle with a polygon and use that instead. Here is the result of that research.

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A lot of dates that come back from XML based web services are in the ISO 8601 form. I found out recently that it isn't straight forward to parse such a date using C functions and have the time come out in the correct timezone. It isn't rocket science but it is a lot more convoluted than higher level languages like Java.

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I've been doing a little C programming lately and I have found that if you have a up to date distribution of linux there are a lot of libraries out there that make doing things you do in other languages like java easier.

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This has been done before with PHP (AJAX upload progress meter for PHP) etc but I needed something a little different because I wanted to upload a file and then have it loaded into a database. I looked around and found that someone had already made something that used the commons file upload package to do the upload part (AJAX Upload progress monitor for Commons-FileUpload Example). It wasn't exactly what I was looking for but it a good start.

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