Using Hibernate import.sql
I knew that hibernate had a mechanism to load an sql script on startup, but I never took the time to track it down. Today I finally decided it was worth the effort. The mechanism is fairly simple, but not well documented.
Name That Class
I was thinking about class naming strategies recently and decided to make a list of commonly used suffixes for Java classes. While this post is more about idioms than patterns, compiling this list sent me back to 1995 (Design Patterns).
InterWiki and Currie Syntax 1.0
The WikiPedia page on InterWiki has a link to the W3C draft specification Currie Syntax 1.0. This is not as powerful as some wiki engines provide, but it's an interesting approach.
TiddlyWiki, Google Apps, Google Analytics
I have used TiddlyWiki at work for deploying documentation and tutorials with web applications. I have even used TiddlyWiki with server-side extentions as a wiki for spacelag. This time around it's just a stock TiddlyWiki served as a file on www.spacelag.com/. That's definitely simple and I love not having to maintain mysql and the rest of the software stack. But how will I know if people are actually visiting the site? For this, Google provides Google Analytics. Signing up was easy and the code snipped required to enable the blog was simple enough, but TiddlyWiki required a little more thinking. I could have just hacked the code to include the required scripts, but this is not the TiddlyWiki way.
ZipCodes and More
Zip codes are extremely convenient for finding places on a map. Just go to maps.yahoo.com and type in "pizza 90120" and you will find approximately 27,466 hits for places whose name contains the word pizza or have categories that contain the word pizza. That's definitely better than the 7,662,184 matches you find with just "pizza". You find that many online store locators will also take a zip code and find all of the stores within a given distance. Definitely useful.
What is a Gazetteer?
For my first post here, I have decided to jump right into the concept of gazetteers. You can expect to see more posts on gazetteers in the near future as I plan to build one.
What is a gazetteer? According to wordnet it's "a geographical dictionary". Wikipedia calls it a "geographical directory" and has lots more to say about the history and the publicly available gazetteers.
