Has a Nuke Gone Off? / / No Comments Not so very long ago – in the days before America became great again – Has a Nuke Gone Off would have made a nice Friday Fun post. Now it doesn’t seem quite so funny. Has a Nuke Gone Off is a simple website that does just thing – it monitors a home-built nuclear blast detector to tell you whether a nuclear bomb has exploded. I am happy to report that as of ‘2025-07-05 05:47:53’ no Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: gone, Nuke
Upcoming Code Break and Live Streams Next Week / / No Comments Hey folks. Next week I’ve got not one, not two, but three different presentations happening. Here’s what I’ve got going on. Code Break Episode 29 My next Code Break episode will be Tuesday, July 8th at 12PM CST. I’ll be doing some playing around with vibe coding, and yes, I still hate that term. But I’ve had some recent successes, and failures, with it and I thought it would be fun to explore. Whether you are pro, or anti, generating code with AI, I’d love to have you come in and share your feedback. The DevRel Show I’ll be on Frédéric Harper’s DevRel show on July 10th at 2PM CST, talking about APIs, specifically Foxit APIs. This is my first time... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Break, code, live, Next, streams, Upcoming, Week
The Doomsday Glacier / / No Comments Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier took thousands of years to form, yet in just the past two decades, its grounding zone, the critical boundary where the glacier meets the seafloor, has receded by over eight miles.As the widest glacier in Antarctica, Thwaites spans an area comparable to the size of Florida. Its potential collapse could have catastrophic global consequences, significantly raising sea Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: Doomsday, Glacier
Parsing CSV in BoxLang – Maven Style / / No Comments I recently did some CSV parsing in ColdFusion while working on my ColdFusion 2025 Hackathon submission, and while I didn’t win, I really enjoyed the little utility I built. That tool made use of CSV parsing support in Adobe ColdFusion and I thought I’d take a look at what I’d need to use to support that in BoxLang. This led me to look for a Java tool and gave me a chance to try something new in BoxLang, Maven support. BoxLang runs on the JVM, but doesn’t really require you to know any Java. Which is good. I’ve been "casually" familiar with Java since it came out, but have never done any real work in it nor really spent any time learning the language. I... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: BoxLang, Maven, Parsing, Style
A City’s Grief in One Street / / No Comments Unless it has happened to you, I guess it is impossible to truly understand what it’s like to have your home destroyed. How, then, can news organizations convey the tragedy of such loss to a public that seems increasingly immune to the horrors of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza?In 2023, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) created an interactive 3D model of an apartment block in Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: City's, Grief, Street
AI with BL / / No Comments Forgive the somewhat cutesy title. I hate vague titles that only serve to be clickbait, but given the subject, I couldn’t help it. This post is about AI, specifically Generative AI, with BL, AKA BoxLang. This has always been possible with BoxLang and any GenAI service that had a REST API, but recently the team released an impressive AI Module that makes this a lot easier. So what does it do? Much like LangChain, the BoxLang AI module provides a unified interface to work with multiple different AI providers. This makes it a bit easier to switch from one service to another. I don’t necessarily see people doing that willy nilly. Each service has it’s unique strengths and weaknesses... more → Posted in: JavaScript
Introducing ESA’s Satellite Stories / / No Comments The European Space Agency (ESA) has launched a new educational platform designed to explain the vital role that satellites and Earth observation play in advancing Earth science, combating climate change, and driving scientific research and technological innovation.Edukeo uses Lobelia’s Globe Story Engine and TeroMaps framework to create immersive, interactive stories. These stories are Maps Mania… more → Posted in: Interactive Maps Tagged with: ESA's, Introducing, Satellite, Stories
Updates to my Table Sorting Web Component / / No Comments It’s been a while since I touched my <table-sort> web component, but last night I had a few interesting ideas and thought I’d do a quick update. For folks who may not remember, I first blogged about this way back in March of 2023. The basic idea was to take an existing table, wrap it in my web component, and sorting would be added automatically. Nice and simple. As an example: <table-sort> <table> <!-- existing table here --> </table> </table-sort> The only real "feature" was that if you included numeric="X", it would consider the Xth column as numeric and ensure sorting worked properly. X in this context could be one column,... more → Posted in: JavaScript Tagged with: Component, Sorting, table, updates