Niall's Weblog

I’ve been playing with the recently-released HTTP API for accessing the Best Buy product catalog. While its a little strange to use at first, its actually pretty useful. One of the things I am interested in is online retail, specifically how to make Internet shopping easier. Lets imagine I am looking for [...]

On ORMs
It so happens that I end up dealing with the Python ORM SQLObject pretty often. I don’t really like ORMs very much, since in my experience they make those 80% of database things that are already easy to do with plain SQL easier, while making the other 20% of database things which are [...]

SQLite is an extremely useful little database. It has a nifty bunch of features and is super simple to set up. Using SQLite reduces the cost of developing and maintaining a powerful SQL database even more than traditional free RDBMS’ like PostgreSQL and MySQL. Your database is simply an on-disk file – [...]

Freebase Suggest is a little JavaScript (and jQuery) widget for adding Freebase’s auto-complete and search API reconciliation features to any of your text boxes. While this might sound a bit strange or pointless initially, its actually incredibly useful in many applications
Imagine you are running a site for your own music reviews. [...]

DNS for things
Freebase is extremely useful for many things, but one of the most simple is as a sort of “DNS for things”. Take for example films, computer games, programming languages. There are various disparate databases, with their own keys, all over the internet. It would be difficult to write an [...]