pat's blog

Easy Custom UITableView Background

Posted Sun, 04/18/2010 - 00:09 by pat

It's embarrassing that it took me this long to figure it out, but there is an easy way to put an image behind a UITableVIew controlled by a UITableViewController.

Searching for info on how to give a grouped table view a custom background will usually only tell you half the story. They tell you how to make the background transparent. They then tell you to put a UIImageView behind it. *Great, thanks.

Easy Geoboxing on AppEngine

Posted Sat, 01/30/2010 - 12:32 by pat

EDIT: Thanks to Karl, who in the comments pointed out multiple flaws in my implementation. I've fixed them and pushed the updated version to github. /EDIT

Geoboxing is a technique for pre-computing bounding boxes for points of interest. On AppEngine geoboxing allows for fast searching using only equality filters, which saves your single inequality filter for other parameters.

The Path to Hell

Posted Sun, 10/18/2009 - 00:59 by pat

I've been contemplating lately a serious problem with BeerHopper's implementation of local search. As it currently stands we use Yahoo local search to find nearby bars and restaurants. Unfortunately there are a few problems with this:

  1. The Yahoo API only allows you to search one category at a time. I worked around this by searching both all_restaurants and all_bars_pubs_and_clubs. Everything's cool right? No, checkout problem 2:
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