Happy Saturday folks. I just spent an hour or two playing "Avowed" (great game) and eventually need to get off my butt and start some bread I want to bake today, so I thought I'd put it off a few minutes more with a quick blog post. As always, these links are meant to be informative, helpful, and fun, so I hope they brighten your day. Date Formatting in JavaScript (Again) Date formatting in JavaScript, or, well, any language, feels like a topic that just keeps coming up. When I saw this link I initially didn't bother clicking, assuming it was about the Intl spec. However, it instead talks abou ..read more

I'm not sure how useful this will be, but as I recently built it in another language (I plan on blogging that soon as well), I thought I'd take a stab at building it in Python. Given a folder of images, can I use Python to grab the Exif information and then using that, figure out where the photos were taken using a reverse geocoding service? Here's what I built. First - Get the Images Ok, the first step is simple, just get a list of images from a directory: INPUT = "./sources" files = os.listdir(INPUT) for file in files: print(file) Woot! I'm a Python Master! Get the Exif info For ..read more

Last week, I blogged about updates to Google's Gemini APIs in regards to image generation. That post detailed how there are now two models for generating images with the experimental Gemini Flash model having a nice free tier. One of the interesting features of the API is the ability to edit existing images, in other words, pass an image to Gemini and via a prompt, have Gemini update it. I thought it would be kind of fun to see if I could build a 'chat' interface for this model, one where you could simply talk to Gemini and have it work on your image along with you. Now to be clear, this is no ..read more

Today's BoxLang quick tip is one near and dear to my heart, generating PDFs. Creating dynamic, expressive PDFs is fairly easy. Let me show you how. As before, I've got a video version as well so you would rather watch that, just skip to the end. Step One - The Module By default, BoxLang doesn't ship with PDF capabilities built-in, you need to add it via the PDF Module. This can be done quickly via the CLI: install-bx-module bx-pdf Installing the module adds three new tags to your BoxLang runtime: bx:document - This is the core tag for PDF generation. Everything inside it will either be cont ..read more

So my last Code Break was... painful. My experience trying to learn React did not go well. Because of that I thought strongly about giving up, but what fun would that be? Join me tomorrow (March 18th) at 12PM CST where I'll, once again, try to learn some basic React features and get a trivial web site built. Will I make it? Probably not! But you can come join me and cheer/heckle me on! I hope to see you there: https://cfe.dev/talkshows/codebreak-03182025 ..read more

Back in January of this year, I wrote up my experience testing out Google's Imagen 3 APIs to generate dynamic images. A few days ago, Google updated their support with new experimental support in Flash. I've been playing with this the last few days and have some code and samples to share with you, but before that, what exactly changed? Gemini and Imagen 3 There are now two different models, and different APIs, to generate images with Google's AI platform. The new one is Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental and the previous one (the one covered in my blog post) is Imagen 3. Of course the next question ..read more

Developers seem to have a love/hate (or perhaps hate/despise) relationship with Jira. I've never minded it, but the biggest issue for me is that if I haven't used it in a while, it can be overwhelming. Yesterday I was thinking about this and wondering if perhaps I could build my own tooling to interact with Jira via an API, if it even had one. Turns out, of course they have an API and it's not terribly difficult to use. With that in mind, I whipped up a quick tool to search Jira via the command line with BoxLang. Jira API Basics The docs for Jira's API are pretty good and cover the huge set of ..read more

Today I'm kicking off a new blog/video series of quick tips for people interested in BoxLang. These 'quick tips' are just that, a look at how BoxLang can simplify working with the JVM and building CLI scripts, web apps, and serverless applications. Each of these posts will include a video along with sample code and help highlight some of the ways BoxLang can be powerful in just a few lines of code. For my first quick tip, let's talk database access, which by the way was one of the reasons I got into ColdFusion nearly thirty years ago (I didn't want to figure out how to do it in Perl!). Working ..read more

Diffbot's Knowledge Graph has a simple purpose - bring the sum total of all knowledge to your fingertips via a search that emphasis data and relations over a simple text based search engine experience. Sourced by the entire web, Knowledge Graph lets you perform complex queries against billions of data points instantly via a simple API. I decided to take a spin with their API and build a "relatively" simple tool - news analysis for a product run in on automated platform. Should be easy, right? Let's get to it. Note that the examples in this blog post assume you've gotten a free key from Diffbot ..read more

Happy afternoon, programs. I just got back one of my kid's soccer games (unlike last season, the weather is pleasant and not scorching hot) and I've got a Saturday now that is 100% open! Which means I'll get a lot done! (Or, more likely, play video games.) So that I can more quickly get to all the important chores and cleaning I'm not going to do, let's get to the links. Code Listings via API First up is a two-fer kinda. Showcode is an excellent web app to create screenshots from code. It supports numerous languages, numerous display options, and so forth, and creates really good output. As an ..read more