27 August 2016 — This is the holy grail that appears in my local New Jersey farmers’ markets in good years about late August: a huge basket of ripe tomatoes for a very small price. That’s the time to make red sauce! My recipe has a quirk or two that I thought might be…

17 September 2017 — I’m a novice at spa culture, but when in Rome .. so I visited the Rudas Thermal Bath while in Budapest. I hope this blog post will help the next novice :) In Sep 2017 the exchange rate was about 250 HUF for 1 USD. The first picture is the…

16 December 2017 — Can I improve a modern cast-iron pan? I’m a recent convert to using cast-iron pans. They’re cheap at about $25, they work great on an induction stovetop, and they make a mean steak, you should try it: https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1016334-cast-iron-steak Why polish my pan? Modern cast-iron pans like those from Lodge are…

5 August 2015 — This blog post shares some lessons learned about batch optical character recognition on PDF documents. There were 3 challenges: deciding whether OCR is necessary for a document, choosing an OCR package, and assessing OCR results. Background In 2014 I drew the assignment of extracting text from over 20,000,000 pages in about…

12 Dec 2014 — This blog entry offers some simple Python 2 scripts for profiling raw data. I was working with a customer to help them understand just exactly what data they are receiving, what it means and how they might best take advantage of it. Some is big data (hundreds of millions of…

23 July 2012 — This blog post offers some pictures and details of my experience with draining and refilling the automatic transmission fluid on a 2009 Honda 4WD CR-V as part of a 60,000 mile service. I hope it helps someone out there! I started down this road when I got a kick in…

18 July 2011 I was using Apache Tika to extract text from files containing all sorts of content, and write that text to files using UTF-8 encoding. After botching it a few times I finally forced myself to learn a bit about encoding systems and Java’s representation of Unicode code…

7 Jan 2012 — I was working on a client to access a RESTful (representation state transfer AKA http) web service. Maybe that’s just the buzzword of choice these days, but the system seems to conform to Wikipedia’s list of REST architecture constraints. I’m reusing version 4.1.2 libraries provided by the Apache HttpComponents project…

7 Oct 2010 I have long loved eating Mexican food in general and salsa in particular. In grad school my buddy Bill and I decided to conduct some experiments with salsa. Well it wasn’t a bad excuse to drink beer, right? So we gathered different onions, different peppers, etc. and…