Decorated House in Dyker Heights, 2011. Canon EOS 5D, EF 24-105mm f/4.

Every year the residents of Dyker Heights, Brooklyn / New York City, decorate their houses with elaborate figures and lights, trying to trump their neighbours in amount or effect. This house was one of the more over-decorated ones in Dyker Heights.

The Lone Cypress. Monterey, 2011. Canon EOS 5D, EF 24-105mm f/4.

This is a quick postcard from my trip to the States. The weather in California is fantastic these days and submerges everything in beautiful light.

I sincerely enjoy working with Groovy (a dynamic language for the JVM) combined with the huge ecosystem of the Java platform. Today I had to extract text from a Word 2010 document. As always, there is an app a library for that.

With Apache Poi and the super easy to use Groovy Grape dependency handling, reading a Word, Excel or OpenOffice document becomes a piece of cake:

@Grab(group='org.apache.poi', module='poi', version='3.7')
@Grab(group='org.apache.poi', module='poi-ooxml', version='3.7')
@Grab(group='org.apache.poi', module='poi-scratchpad', version='3.7')
 
import org.apache.poi.extractor.ExtractorFactory
 
class PoiTest {
    static def main(args) {
 
        def extractor = ExtractorFactory.createExtractor(new File(args[0]))
        
        println extractor.getText()
 
    }
}