Casey Cesari caseycesari

Tabletop.js is a fantastic, open-source JavaScript library that lets developers easily integrate data from Google Spreadsheets into their online projects. I've used it, even contributed a minor feature, and love it for prototyping. Non-programmers love being able to update a project via Google Spreadsheets' hyper-intuitive interface.

That said, I'm extraordinarily wary of using Tabletop in production. Instead, at the Wall Street Journal, we use a bit of middleware to "prune" our Google Spreadsheets-based data and then cache it on our own servers. A few brief reasons:

Short-Term Reliability. With Tabletop, your project depends on Google not to rate-limit access to your spreadsheet. Google rate-limits access to their Spreadsheet API, though the thresholds aren't clear. If you're building an app you care about, you don't want to be i

Until last night I lived in fear of tildes, carats, resets and reverts in Git. I cargo culted, I destroyed, I laid waste the tidy indicies, branches and trees Git so diligently tried to maintain. Then Zach Holman gave a talk at Paperless Post. It was about Git secrets. He didn't directly cover these topics but he gave an example that made me realize it was time to learn.

A better undo

Generally, when I push out bad code, I panic, hit git reset --hard HEAD^, push and clean up the pieces later. I don't even really know what most of that means. Notational Velocity seems to be fond of it ... in that I just keep copying it from Notational Velocity and pasting it. Turns out, this is dumb. I've irreversibly lost the faulty changes I made. I'll probably even make the same mistakes again. It's like torching your house to get rid of some mice.

Enter Holman. He suggests a better default undo. git reset --soft HEAD^. Says it stag

Building GDAL 1.9.x with ESRI FileGDB support on OS X Lion

Download the SDK from ESRI's website http://resources.arcgis.com/content/geodatabases/10.0/file-gdb-api
Extract the SDK, and put the contents of the directory in a known location, I used ~/local/filegdb. Here's an example path to one of the files: ~/local/filegdb/lib/libFileGDBAPI.dylib
I use ~/local/filegdb so it can stay isolated in it's own place. You can put it anywhere, but the next few steps might be different.
Go into the directory containing the FileGDB SDK, e.g. ~/local/filegdb
ESRI built these dylib's using @rpath's, so to avoid needing to mess with DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH, I updated the @rpath's using install_name_tool. There might be a more elegant way to handle this. If so, comments are welcome!
Here are the commands I used to patch the dylibs, this is not required if you want to use DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH yourself:

	Use extractDocs.py to parse and index the StackOverflow posts.xml file into an existing index.

	Usage: extractDocs.py [options] file

	Options:
	-h, --help show this help message and exit
	-s SERVER, --server=SERVER
	ElasticSearch Server
	-i INDEX, --index=INDEX
	Index name to use