mike.mainguy

As a person who has had the luxury to work in both ruby on rails and groovy grails, I've found a few differences that make their approach quite a bit different. #1 Groovy allows you to write java. While this isn't a huge deal, it can be both a positive and a negative. I've worked on teams where folks treat grails as a super simple java framework and never leverage any of groovy's dynamic goodness. While this isn't a huge problem, it does delay (or eliminate) to transition from J2EE xml configuration file hell into a more dynamic way of coding. #2 Ruby forces you to learn "the ruby way". For folks who are only used to java, seeing ruby code is like...seeing another language. Because of this, the idioms used in java are more quickly forgotten and you more quickly become a ruby native because you MUST. Only having worked with a few other people while they moved from java to ruby, I can only speak from my personal experience. I can say that ruby...

Early Results Here are some early results: Port Huron, MI Rockford, IL These maps show the first page of garage sales on craigslist with about a 50% accuracy rate (meaning, only about 1/2 of time can I find an address). That having been said, it's still pretty impressive as manually entering these things into google maps is.... tedious. This process takes about 60 seconds per city using the script I've written. Back to Geocoding Note, geocoding is the process of attaching geographic coordinates to data. In my case I can find a "reasonable" address in about 1/2 of the entries. This means there is a string somewhere that looks like an address, notably, it has a few numbers, and then a couple of words. To get this data and geocode it, I wrote an awk script $1 ~ /\([0-9]+ .+\)/ {match($1,/([0-9]+ [^\)\(]+)\)/,out); printdata( "\""out[1]"\"")} $1 !~ /\([0-9]+ .+\)/ && $2 ~ /[0-9]+ [a-zA-Z]+ [a-zA-Z]+ /{match($2,/([0-9]...

The Backstory My wife is an avid garage sailer. She finds garage sales she thinks have promise, then cruises by them to see if there is anything of interest. She is so accomplished at this that she routinely turns a profit by snagging things that folks didn't realize had resale value, and flipping them at local consignment shops. While this doesn't pay the bills, it DOES provide enough extra cash to actually have her garage sailing at least pay for itself with a little left over. This is, however, not without it's share of problems: First, the postings online (or paper) for garage sales are scattered to the four winds. At this point, craigslist.org is the hands down winner for quality and quantity of posts. Local newspapers/classified also have a good quantity, but the few sites I found on google geared toward this are suffering terribly from a strategic chicken and egg problem. Second, while craigslist has a fairly high quality set of sales established, it h...