One of our core SMTP relay servers ran out of space and had an overflowing mail queue. Here’s the crazy story of how I fixed it. Read more →

Django – selective restore of DB dump
If you are running a Django application, hopefully you have regular backups of the DB. We had a customer who realized they deleted something over a month ago and needed the deleted objects restored. Instead of just reverting the entire DB and losing all of the new information, I wrote a simple script that will create a fixture of everything that was… Read more →

Cord Cutting The Geek Way – Watch your favorite TV shows for free, anytime, anywhere!
My wife and I love to watch TV. Currently there are a few shows that we tune in for every week: Castle, The Mentalist, Last Man Standing, Grimm, Community, The Big Bang Theory, Bones, Modern Family, and Psych! Yeah, we spend a lot of time watching TV, and that doesn’t include all the great shows that we like to re-watch… Read more →

High Performance JavaScript – Array Creation & Population
JavaScript Arrays Arrays in JavaScript are very easy to use and there are some simple tricks to make them perform at peak efficiency. Testing shows that the recommended standard method for declaring arrays in JavaScript ( var a = [];) has pretty poor performance when compared to using the less popular alternative ( var a = new Array(100);). Most people argue that the performance difference is negligible and the benefits of the standard method… Read more →

Python Google Speech to Text API implementation
This constantly seems to be a request on Stack Overflow, and the fact that documentation for Google’s Speech API is practically non-existent, I have decided to share an implementation of it with everyone. If you just want the source code here you go. Google Speech API Supported File Types First off, your audio must first be encoded in the FLAC… Read more →
Blogging is Hard
I am one of those people who likes to put a lot of thought into what I write. Even simple things like emails often take me much longer to write than they probably should as I am constantly re-reading and re-writing line after line, paragraph after paragraph. Trying to express my thoughts and opinions in an eloquent way, constantly worrying… Read more →

How to Install Windows 7 with only USB 3.0 Ports
Background If you have tried to install Windows 7 using a USB Flash Drive on a system that only has USB 3.0 ports, you might have found that you couldn’t get past the Language Select screen of the installer as your keyboard and mouse didn’t work. I recently had this problem when trying to install Win 7 onto my Gigabyte Brix XM12-3227.… Read more →

Google Speech Recognition – API Information & Guidelines
Google’s Speech Recognition is quick and powerful, and handles a bunch of different languages. I have compiled together a bunch of information that I have found while learning how to use the Speech API outside of Google Chrome for audio files. I hope my time spent reverse engineering their protocol and compiling this document can save you some of your… Read more →
TravisPayton.com is FINALLY updated!
So I have finally gotten around to working on my website. My domain has existed for a couple years, but the main page has not been anything more than a static, uninteresting, and dry landing page stating “more would be coming soon”. Well, that “more” is now! Now the main page is a glorious single page dynamic website with links… Read more →