I recently received some data in the Advantage Database Server file format (.adt). In the past I have worked with DBF, Access, and .xls. I was able to find some way to retrieve data from these formats using open source software. The open source solutions were much easier to work with, usually not requiring any sort of driver installation, etc.

I searched thoroughly for an easy way to retrieve information from this set of .ADT files I was dealing with. Sybase provides tools to work with the data, but all of them require using their software or drivers developed by them. I would have settled for this if it wasn’t such a hassle to figure out how to use them. I asked the question on Stackoverflow.com and got an answer from one of the employee’s of Sybase. While helpful, the suggested Perl driver was one of the things I was avoiding. I did attempt it and after a little hassle, moved on to creating a simpler solution.

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Some of the data I’ve been dealing with lately is in Microsoft Access databases (.mdb files). I’ve been surprised with the lack of support for manipulating these files outside of Access. There are a couple solutions, but nothing satisfied me needs. The worst data set came to me in a few hundred different .mdb files. It looked like the person that exported the database exported a copy of the database for each unique facility. So each facility had a file, but the schema for each file was exactly the same. It was apparent that in order to do any sort of complex queries on the data, the files would have to be combined. I was recommended a tool called mdbtools by somebody at a local Ruby meetup. I ended up using this along with Ruby inside of a Rake task to convert all my .mdb files into a single MySQL database. (more…)

Most people have had some experience with ruby’s built in #uniq method for Arrays. Internally, this method finds the unique items in the array by creating a hash internally, and this internal comparison is done with the #eql? method. If an item in the array is a Hash, then #eql? simply uses the object_id, generated by the #hash method, to determine whether it is equal to another object in the array. There are many solutions online each with s light variations and goals. I found myself in need of a uniq method for an array containing items in an arbitrarily deep nested structure (ie many sub-hashes and arrays). (more…)

Have you ever found yourself slightly modifying a URL to try to find something you know used to exist or should exist but you keep getting that dreaded 404 page?  Perhaps you were trying to find something that shouldn’t be online anymore but it was simply unlinked to, benevolent purposes or otherwise? Another example might be that a site’s main homepage is down and so many users are unable to access the site.  If they had a list of URLs they could see which are still valid very quickly with the URL Archive and go to the site through those URLs.  Google cache and Wayback Machine get you pretty close to what you’re after but sometimes they just fall a little too short.  Some things are beyond even Google’s giant umbrella of web applications (at least for now).

I’m sure an application focusing more on URLs is somebody’s 10% project somewhere sitting on the backburner until they have time to finish it.  It seems like almost anything you’d want to do has a corresponding web application.  When I come across a need that doesn’t I just feel like that void should soon be filled.  I’m going to outline the application that I believe would fill this void.  Maybe in future posts I’ll also walkthrough my attempts to do it as my personal .5% project. (more…)

I had some ideas that required some sort of necklace simulator through a web interface.  I didn’t have much experience programming anything complex in ActionScript, but I was sure that would be the way to go.  I have seen some amazing work done with Flash applications over the past few years and I had no doubt that Flash could handle such an application.  So I set out on one weekend to put together a quick prototype for my idea.

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