Sometimes it's useful to check whether a local JAR file is available from Maven Central, for example when converting an old build system to Maven. In many old systems, JARs aren't named consistently and versioning info isn't available. Fortunately, Maven Central has a search interface that supports lookup by a …
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Converting Images to ASCII Art
I've been playing with Docker a lot lately. Docker is a tool for creating lightweight virtual environments based on Linux containers. They are extremely useful for running services, but you can also use them for running one-off tasks that you don't want to run on the host system directly. Since …
read moreRemote-Controlling a Sonos Device Using Python
I couple of months ago I bought a Sonos Play:1, a pretty cool wireless speaker that comes with free controller apps for major platforms (Android, Windows etc.). To give the speaker access to my music collection, I hooked up a USB drive to my home router and shared the …
read moreVisualizing Package Dependencies
Managing module or package dependencies is an important design activity that helps to keep a software project maintainable. Visualizing these dependencies is a good way of getting a first impression on a project and for exposing design problems. In this article we're going to create a basic visualization for a …
read moreBasics of Near Duplicate Detection
Finding duplicate files is easy, anyone can do it. Finding files that are almost identical is more difficult, but it's useful for use cases like detecting plagiarism. In this article, I'll present a simple python program that calculates the textual similarity of two documents.
The basic idea is to reduce …
read moreFinding the Majority Item in a Stream
Ubuntu: Changes in Python 2.6
Once in a while, I install Python packages from source using distutils. The distutils-powered setup.py script found in many packages installs software in /usr/local/ - quite useful because it doesn't interfere with packages managed by your distribution. Since Ubuntu Jaunty and Python 2.6, this doesn't work anymore.
Previously …
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