Christopher Maier

I’ve been playing around with VirtualBox lately, and it’s pretty nifty. Initially I just used it to set up an Ubuntu machine so I could easily run GnuCash on my MacBook, but lately I’ve decided to start using it at work, too. I’ve got lots of plans: figure out how to use Chef, set up my own Hudson server, get a MongoDB cluster running, etc. I’d like all of these machines to be able to access the internet for downloading packages and the like, and I also want to be able to access them easily from my host machine. [Read More]

I just heard that my map-reduce patch and my my GridFS InputStream patch for Congomongo were both committed to the main Congomongo repository! This marks my first official open source code contributions, and hopeuflly not the last.

I’ve recently started a Clojure / MongoDB project at work to help us with our proteogenomic annotation work. Naturally, I’m using Congomongo to interact with the database. It’s a great wrapper for the MongoDB Java driver, written in a very nice functional style. Lately I’ve been looking into the map-reduce capabilities of MongoDB and have been trying to figure out how to make it work from Clojure. Looking at the Congomongo API, I came across the server-eval function, which looked like a promising place to start. [Read More]

Do you need an easy way to search Clojure’s API? Do you use Google’s Chrome browser? If so, you’re in luck; it’s incredibly easy to add a custom engine to Chrome to search the API. Here’s how. Setting Up a Custom Search Engine First, open your preferences and hit the “Manage” button down by “Default Search”. That will bring up a Search Engines box. This is how Chrome knows to search, say, Google for whatever you type in the Address Bar (or OmniBox, as it’s also known). [Read More]

I’m in the process of migrating from an older version of PostgreSQL to a newer version. I’d like to see what the differences are between the configuration (${PG_DATA}/postgresql.conf) of both servers. I couldn’t find an easy, ready-made solution, so I hacked up one using plain old SQL, which turns out to be particularly well suited to comparing sets of data :) First, get the settings from the old server. We’ll use psql to execute the SHOW ALL query and pipe the result (stripped of all extraneous formatting) to the file old_settings. [Read More]

As per the instructions on the Jekyll install page, gem install jekyll then (since I didn’t have this set already): export PATH=${PATH}:/Users/maier/.gem/ruby/1.8/bin added to my Bash ~/.profile file. Pygments is cool for syntax highlighting. On a Mac with MacPorts, it’s as easy as this: sudo port install python25 py25-pygments Running Jekyll with its standalone server is great for testing your site locally: jekyll --auto --server That’ll run an embedded web server at http://localhost:4000 (by default); anytime you change any of your site files, Jekyll will reprocess them and make them available immediately. [Read More]