Creating a Custom Jenkins Plugin with JRuby

I have seen scenarios where I would like to not have Jenkins not execute builds under certain circumstances. One common example is with the Maven Project Plugin, it will often update the .pom file and check it back into source control. When you have Jenkins jobs that poll source code repos for new commits, your builds will enter an endless cycle of triggering more builds.   It would be nice to have the ability to stop builds from executing when the commit contained a specified phrase... [More]

Continuous Deployment on SportCollectors.Net

I am the type of person who likes to build cool things that help solve some folks' problems, especially my own problems. With that said, I'm always going to look to minimize the amount of things I have to do over and over so I have more time to build cool stuff. Since I mainly create software applications, building/testing/deploying code are necessary activities - and they can be very painful. For far too long (2000-2012) I would code away on big new features on SportsCollectors.Net f... [More]

Measuring, Understanding, and Predicting Subscriber Value

The subscription business model is a business model where a customer must pay a subscription price to have access to the product/service. Below are some examples of some popular commercial subscription offerings: Salesforce.com has built a popular brand offering CRM functions. Amazon, Microsoft, etc. offer hosting infrastructure.  WeightWatchers and eDiets offer access to their diet information, tools, and community. Getty offers download of stock photography. Netflix and H... [More]

Web Enable R models with Shiny

Last September I was preparing for my fantasy football league and I found this really cool web app that suggested the optimal draft recommendations based on the rules of your league. I then found the associated article on r-bloggers that explained how it was done: http://www.r-bloggers.com/win-your-fantasy-football-snake-draft-with-this-shiny-app-in-r/ Shiny is the secret sauce to make this possible: The Shiny package makes it super simple for R users like you to turn analyses into ... [More]

My Auction Framework MVP

I have been a huge fan of eBay since the moment I first found it (back in 1997 or so). It truly was the world changing marketplace because: It quickly gained critical mass with worldwide populations of buyers and sellers. The auction format is easy to understand and allowed the market to determine the prices.  It was an early web 1.0 company that thrived after the dotcom bust of 2001. Over the years, I have seen both start ups and established companies launch would be competitors to... [More]

Between the Numbers

I am a huge baseball fan, and I am especially excited that my Boston Red Sox won the 2013 World Series. Part of my love for the game and math came from following the statistical performance of different players and comparing them. I can remember the endless debates with my friends as a kid about who was better, Wade Boggs or Don Mattingly. My dad and his friends debated their generation’s stars - Ted Williams vs. Joe Dimaggio vs. Mickey Mantle. Until the past 10-15 years, there was a stan... [More]

Adding Facebook Comments to BlogEngine.Net

This blog runs using the open source BlogEngine.net platform using ASP.Net 4.0. So far I have been pretty happy with the features provided overall, as it was pretty straight forward to set up and there are many themes/widgets. The issue I had with using the out of the box comments system was seeing about 15 spams comments posted a day. I've seen some of the bigger blogs use Facebook Comments and they had less of the spammy junk, like ESPN in the screenshot below:  ... [More]

Decorating sites with Browser Extensions

We’re big fans of internet grocer FreshDirect in my household. When we lived in Brooklyn and now in North Jersey, we place a delivery order about once a week. While there is a lot I like about the service offering, there are a few features that could improve the user experience. One of the big ones for me would be to associate WeightWatchers points values for each food on the site. It would save me a bunch of time and frustration if my wife and I would be able to see them while we were fi... [More]

Calculating WeightWatchers points from a picture of the Nutritional Information

When I have tried to track the food I am eating as part of a diet, entering the key nutrition elements was not always convenient. Since I haven't seen a WeightWatchers product for reading nutritional values from a picture, I thought it would be a cool thing to prototype. One of the guys in my office had a box of oatmeal packets on his desk, so he took a picture with his iPhone 5 -  (oatmeal_photo.JPG (2.99 mb)). Below is a lower resolution version:   I had never previo... [More]

Powershell Module for transferring files via SFTP

I had the need for several automated jobs to be able to exchange files securely with partners via the Secure FTP (SFTP). I chose powershell because the jobs: get executed on windows nodes. It is less overhead than creating console apps in .NET required things like querying databases, transforming data, and archiving files I spent a little bit of time looking into different options, and decided to utilize the latest version of the WinSCP library provided the required options... [More]