I bought a new GPS recently (Garmin nuvi 1350LMT) and wanted to upload new maps to it using Garmin’s MapSource software. However, the software only supports Windows and Mac so I had no choice but to do it on Windows. Since I already have a Windows XP virtual machine running on VirtualBox (which I use for work as our company’s remote access software doesn’t support Linux either) I figured I could probably just …

I was working on my personal project last week and needed to import some data in CSV format to a PostgreSQL database. I wanted only certain fields to be imported so I had to specify this in the command. I’m new to PostgreSQL so it took me quite a bit of Googling to figure out exactly how to do this.

Here’s how I did it on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, ‘glucosetracker’ is the name of my …

We attended the PyCon 2011 in Atlanta, GA early this month, which is the longest conference I’ve ever attended (March 9-17, 9 days total) but it was so worth it! We’re mainly a Java shop and we’re fairly new to Python so PyCon really showed us what we can do with Python and all these tools available for it that could really help us with our development. After the conference we’re pretty much convinced that …

Back to Java coding!

We have a Java application that calls an external application and since it gets called quite often we figured we should probably log its standard output and standard error streams to a separate log file so we could easily locate issues with it later. This would also allow us to create a different message format for it and different handlers.

Luckily, it turned out that this is pretty easy to do …

A few days ago I was trying to unlock the screen on my Dell Streak and I was having a hard time dragging the lock icon, it wouldn’t go all the way through and not responding well. I thought my Dell Streak was busy at first, maybe a process was using up a lot of resources in the background, but when I was finally able to drag it all the way and at the screen …