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Character Sets and Character Encoding: A Unicode/UTF-8 Primer

Recently, I’ve been forced to fill a number of gaps in my knowledge of international character sets and encodings. The most important thing I learned is that understanding and working with international languages is surprisingly simple.

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Resty: REST/JSON in Java Made So Much Easier!

I love it when something so useful is made so simple to use.  Take a look at Resty, an all-in-one HTTP client for Java with native support for parsing JSON.

Here’s an example from the Resty website:

Resty r = new Resty();
Object name = r.json("http://ws.geonames.org/" +
  "postalCodeLookupJSON?postalcode=66780&country=DE")
  .get("postalcodes[0].placeName");

Data Science Toolkit

Yesterday, I came across this little gem of a public API: Data Science Toolkit

From their web site:

A collection of the best open data sets and open-source tools for data science, wrapped in an easy-to-use REST/JSON API with command line,Python and Javascript interfaces. Available as a self-contained VM or EC2 AMI that you can deploy yourself.

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How to Setup a Simple, Very Secure CVS Repository

The most secure CVS repository setup also happens to be the simplest.

The following commands, when executed at the linux command-line, will create and initialize a CVS repository. It is accessible by any user with an account on the same host in the ‘cvs’ group, either while logged in locally or remotely over SSH.

sudo su -
groupadd cvs
mkdir /cvs
export CVSROOT=/cvs
cvs init
chgrp -R cvs /cvs
chmod g+w /cvs

Caveat: This is a great setup for a small, or technically-savvy group of CVS users, but if you need anonymous access, or if your users are not comfortable with SSH, you may want to provide pserver access.