I am Joshua Johanan and this is a blog about writing code

I have not posted anything here in awhile. My plan is to create a new post every month. I was previously attempting this and I was successful for a little while in 2012. The last two months I have been really busy. The first thing that took a lot of my time was my primary job. I work for a hospital. We have just finished out a huge project where we replaced the core application all the physicians and nurses use.

The first few posts of this blog dealt with PHP and Zend Framework. I am now leaving PHP behind. I am going to focus on using Python and Django (probably a few others: Flask and web.py look great for small sites) from now on. This leads to a question: why? First, I have dabbled in Python and liked it. I had created a few simple Google App Engine sites. I used webapp (an App Engine framework) to build them.

Create a Webcam Library I created a small shim/abstraction library to make getting and using the webcam easier. I used what I learned from creating CreateMyPhotobooth (this is a small plug, but I am relaying what I learned from this). I have the project on github with a demo, grunt build info, and tests. Use of the Library When you include the library you will have access to the wcvj (WebCamVidJa) object.

This will be just a quick post. Sometimes you have to prove your ownership of a domain. This is true when you sign up for Google Web Master Tools or want to run a test with Blitz.io. Google and Blitz.io give you a long hexadecimal string that you have to respond to from your site. In the case of Blitz.io they give you a string that needs to respond with ’42’.

I recently moved this website to run in the cloud. It was previously running on an old computer in my basement. I have had plans to play with EC2 machines. I also needed to update my Ubuntu install since it was 10.04. One more mark for moving the server to the cloud column was that I switched ISPs. AT&T was my ISP for the last 3 years, but Comcast had wooed me in with a deal.

I have fallen behind writing posts through Christmas and the new year. I plan on making more posts and github repos. I can tell by the traffic and starring/forking of my repos that these posts at least help a few people out there. Now that I have stated my excuses, a saying I have heard is that excuses only make you feel better, is to lay out a road map of my next few posts.

Just a quick note on the commenting side of the blog is that I am switching over to Disqus. The previous system used Facebook and although it did work I did not like it all that much. I really haven’t had to much commenting so far, but if you have commented I have not migrated it over.

I want to give a quick thanks to Theshibboleth who created the SVG of the US. I downloaded it from Wikipedia. The SVG SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. The simplest definition is that it is an XML file that describes how to build an image. If you would like to know more as always you can use Wikipedia or do a quick Google search. SVG has support in HTML5 for inline and loading.