Blog
A few weeks ago I described my families new years celebration, building a arduino car bot that we used to have a family dance-off. We've been playing around with the arduino bot, and I decided to make it drive and avoid obstacles autonomously. The bot has a servo at the front, with a ultrasonic distance sensor attached to it. The servo turns the sensor in 180 degrees to effectively from side to side. This gives the ability to roughly judge distance objects by the robot. The…
My kids received a robotics kit for Christmas. Here's an Amazon link to a similar car. It was a fun project to put together to explain some of the inner workings of robotics. My oldest has been working with scratch, so he really was interested in what 'real code' looks like. It also gave me an excellent way to revisit C/C++ programming as it had been a while since I had done any projects in it. With the project, we did a dance-off. Each member of our family came up with a…
I've been working with Apache Nifi for some integration projects at work. It's a decent data workflow tool. Consider it's free, then it's a great integration tool in businesses where cost or infrastructure management is an issue. It's also graphical, which personally I'm not a fan of (give me code any day), but lowers the bar to entry for simple problems and those less experienced in coding. I recently had a problem that I thought would be simple for Nifi to solve. I had a…
Deploying any single page application requires a web server to host static content. Traditionally, having a web server requires configuring a server somewhere to run the software to host the application. I have been using docker for approximately two years, and it's become one of my favorite tools to deploy applications. The main benefit is the simplicity of configuring and using different software components. Using a new technology is easy as a container gets packaged up…
I'm working on a project utilizing Java and Spring Framework. Recently, I had a situation where I was calling a SOAP web service was taking a very long time to complete. This is a simple problem to resolve. I just needed to increase the receive timeout. However, the actual code to fix this was not quite as straight forward. For my client code, I usually make a simple wrapper to make WebService calls by extending the WebServiceGatewaySupport class. From time to time, I…