Open Kosmaczewski

(écrit le 6 avril 1996)

L’histoire humaine est pleine de surprises. Prenons, par exemple, le cas tres particulier des “Multiplication des J”. En effet, de très nombreuses personnalités connues par leurs réalisations dans de très nombreux domaines possèdent des patronymes commençant par la lettre J, considérée d’ailleurs par certaines castes de chamans du sud de la polynésie comme miraculeuse.
Citons, à titre d’exemple, les noms suivants:
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Estaba el diablo mal parado en la esquina de mi barrio
ahi donde dobla el viento y se cruzan los atajos.
Al lado de él estaba la muerte,
con una botella en la mano me miraban de reojo
y se reían por lo bajo.
Y yo que esperaba no sé a quién,
al otro lado de la calle del otoño
una noche de bufanda que me encontró desvelado,
entre dientes oí a la muerte que decía así:

Cuántas veces se habrá escapado,
como laucha por tirante
y esta noche que no cuesta nada, ni siquiera fatigarme,
podemos llevarnos un cordero, con solo cruzar la calle.
Yo me escondí tras la niebla y miré al infinito,
a ver si llegaba ese que nunca iba a venir.
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Not to mention that Singapore is slightly southern where it should be, or that Houston is a bit too close to Monterrey, but I’m too picky there.

Found in one of those companies doing website monitoring 24×7, which shall remain nameless. In terms of maps (and geographical knowledge in general) I’ve seen much worse, if you ask me, even in non-US mass media.

A comment at the bottom of his own lengthy but otherwise interesting article:

One more important point: I’m surprised that some people seem to think I’m implying some programming studliness from my little 3-day excursion. Not so: any first-year college student or intern, or heck, self-taught dude in his basement, could have done exactly what I did.

I failed utterly to convey the right point here, by unfortunately being way too subtle about it. The recounting of total hours spent was a hats-off compliment to Apple for having written such great APIs, documentation, and tools.

Let me be clearer about it, then: Apple’s development environment is nothing short of amazing, which I fully expected, knowing it derived originally from NeXTStep and has had fifteen or twenty years of innovations piled on.

The APIs are _clean_. This is why I was able to narrow down the APIs I needed so quickly.

The whole thing I got working was no more than 50 lines of code, most of it error-handling. That’s C code, so it’s impressive how much it accomplishes in so little space.

The takeaway here is that more programmers ought to jump in and start playing with OS X. You get results faster than you’d think.

I’ve just installed the excellent wp-super-cache plugin to accelerate things a bit in this blog; today somebody sent one of my pages to reddit and I’ve had more users than usual! - by the way, thanks for coming! :)

Update: I admit, it also has a bit to do with the reading of today’s entry in Coding Horror ;) But I love WordPress nonetheless. I prefer it over MovableType (which I used during one year and a half).

The only glitch was: at first, it didn’t work. I think you know the feeling.

The plugin was enabled, everything was activated, yet no files were cached: exactly this same problem. And I found a quick fix to it, hence this post: fire your FTP client of choice and go to /wp-content/cache. If you don’t see a “supercache” folder in there, just create it. Magically, if you have some traffic on your blog and you dig in that folder a couple of seconds later you’ll see already lots of files! No need to modify .htaccess whatsoever.

If you want to populate it, log out of the WordPress admin and start clicking on your blog. This plugin only creates cached files for anonymous visitors! I also turned on the compression so you should start having faster response times.

It was the only thing to do manually to get it working. Hope this helps! Any comments, as usual, more than welcome.

This is the documented path to my discovery of PostgreSQL 8.3, which I’ve never used before. Now that MySQL’s community is getting hammered to death by Sun, and thanks to all the good things I’ve heard about it over the years (including enhanced performance on multicore systems and greater scalability), I really wanted to install it and play with it.

Frankly, it’s not easy. At all (actually this is why I think MySQL is so popular, because of the ease of installation!) So hang tight and read on.
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Let’s say that you have a vCard file. You can export it from your Mac OS X AddressBook.app, or from any other similar application. Now you need to extract some information from it, namely the e-mails, for spamming your friends with some boring news. Typical.

Enter vobject. This Python library is part of the Chandler effort (which seems to be somewhat ill-fated since Mitch Kapor announced he was leaving the project). Anyway, you can download this library from here and then install it using the common sequence:

python setup.py build
python setup.py install


Finally, here’s a bit of code to quickly extract the names and e-mail addresses from a vCard file called “vCards.vcf” containing lots of vCard instances, one after the other (AddressBook.app exports data this way, instead of creating on file per contact):

The library documentation, to put it simply, isn’t as good as the library itself (see? I can be politically correct sometimes :) Maybe I missed a better way to iterate over the contents of the whole stream of vCard instances inside the file (using exceptions for that is yuck!), but then again, feel free to add your comments below as usual.

Using Python’s own unittest package, here’s a small script that can iterate over your test suite to output a small, quick, nice list of the tests in your application:

This would yield something like this:

Business
    Accounts have at least one entry
    Clerks cannot close accounts
Security
    Users can create new accounts
    Anonymous users cannot access private areas
...


Of course, you’ll get better results if you follow Google’s naming conventions for your tests… ;) This is not rspec (nor an alternative to it) but it might be useful to some of you.

Just as a reminder for Django users: you might need to


setenv DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE application.settings


or


export DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=application.settings


in order to make the script work properly! At least I had to :)

Chiste de Rep en la tapa de Pagina/12 de hoy:

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