Screen-scraping a .NET site with App Engine/Java

My impetus for developing this was the desire to populate a hidden page on my blog with live data from a pair of funds, namely an ebay merchant account used as a rollover fund for donations, and a 529 account from an Ohio provider.

There is an excellent API for ebay merchant accounts that I was able to integrate quickly with App Engine. The blog page performs a poor man's AJAX call to an appspot.com servlet, which in turn queries the ebay API for a current balance, and in the end the dollar amount is returned to the blogspot XMLHttpRequest, where a simple DOM .innerHTML replace populates the browser window with the balance. Here's a quick rundown of the code:

Blogger hooks

Rollover account balance: <span id="pcfBalance">??</span><br />
<script>
var xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
xmlhttp.onreadystatechange = function() {
  if(xmlhttp.readyState == 4){
    document.getElementById('pcfBalance').innerHTML = xmlhttp.responseText;
  }
};
xmlhttp.open("GET","http://[my application].appspot.com/pcfbal",true);
xmlhttp.send(null);
</script>

App Engine servlet

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Why Sheffer's Stroke is NAND instead of NOR

As a young boy, diving into mathematics was a great release for me. I often manipulated numbers in my head, independently discovered cross-multiplication, and found the gradeschool introduction to logic fascinating. Logic, of course, one needs to understand intuitively in order to be an effective coder.

Famous science personalities were my heroes. From Newton himself playing with equations of planetary motion in his giant Principia tome, to Godel showing with marvelous simplicity that all mathematical investigation will be (hopelessly?) incomplete, to Hoffstadter's work on artificial intelligence (and from whom I first heard the word "meme"), to Feynman picking locks at Los Alamos for kicks and investigating what he found interesting with little regard to its future practical value.

These were the giants to be revered, the Atlases holding the world on their shoulders. If only we could all be like them, forgoing our petty disagreements, cults of personality, and clanishness... or so I thought. Later when I realized that the science and maths world contained all of these things, it was quite disillusioning. Yes, even the greats stepped on each other's work, stole each other's credit, and disagreed on basic notation and phraseology of important concepts, particularly as a new field was being developed.

"Sheffer's Stroke" is an example of this kind of thing. Denoted by "|" (or "pipe" as we techies call it), in modern notation it refers to the logical NAND function. a|b is true in all cases where a and b are not both true. However, Henry Sheffer explicitly refers to his proposed function as "neither-nor", false in all cases where a and b are not both false. In his 1913 paper "A set of five independent postulates for Boolean algebras, with application to logical constants", he has this to say:

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