Monthly Archives: December 2007

Argentina and the World Clock Dashboard Widget

Posted on by

As you might know, Argentina has changed its timezone today from GMT-4 GMT-3 to GMT-2; as a result, Apple’s World Clock dashboard widget does not (currently) show the correct time for our preferred tango+asado+soccer city.

This happens because the code of this widget calls the “TimeZoneInfo.currentTimeForTimeZone” method (line 582 of the World Clock.js file), which is provided by the runtime, and thus you have to wait until Apple provides a fix for it (please correct me if I’m wrong!).

Since Dashboard Widgets are JavaScript-based, I’ve copied it and created a new one with a small fix in lines 18 and 581 of the World Clock.js file, which makes it show the correct time for my birth city. Of course, this will change in March (when Buenos Aires falls back from GMT-2 to GMT-3) so you might want to fall back to the default World Clock widget when that happens (or when Apple fixes the time zone information in Mac OS X).

You can download the widget! As always, I’m not responsible of any problem it might bring to your system (in mine it works fine though!).

Before and after:

before.png after.png

This was effectively my first time dealing with Dashboard Widgets (something I wanted to do for some time…) I hope to create a real one soon!

Carta de Patricia Troncoso, comunera mapuche que lleva 72 días de huelga de hambre, a Michelle Bachelet

Posted on by

(enviado por alejandra pinto)

Patricia Troncoso Robles: -Yo quiero señalar y ser bien enfática de que la huelga de hambre que yo he asumido, que sigue dándose y que hoy día el señor (Christian) Dulansky (secretario regional ministerial de Justicia) debe tener en su mesa. Nosotros en estos momentos, en mi caso llevo 20, 5 kg bajados, yo no estoy por bajarme de esta huelga, ni hacer un receso porque el año pasado este mismo gobierno de la Concertación nos engañó. Envió a dos de sus senadores con la firma y el compromiso de muchos diputados y senadores (chilenos) para que a través de un proyecto de ley se repare la injusticia que estos mismos gobiernos de la Concertación han hecho en contra de nuestro Pueblo, que es la aplicación de leyes altamente represivas heredadas por el gobierno (la dictadura militar) de Pinochet. Continue reading →

Erlang is a hot thing, indeed. Here’s why.

Posted on by

I usually have around 50 to 80 visits per day in this blog; I’m not that famous after all, mind you; it must be the polish family name, people must have a hard time typing it ;)

Today I checked my report at Google Analytics… and this is what I saw: more than 600 visits for yesterday alone! Not only that, but I’ve had 10 comments posted in many articles of this blog, just yesterday, while usually I get one or two per week:

visits.png

Apparently yesterday’s Erlang article was the main drive for all of these visits:

content.png

But how did it happen? It seems that someone posted the link at programming.reddit.com and lots of people came to see:

sources.png

It this means anything about Erlang, well, I think I must learn more about it, faster! This is amazing!

Thanks everyone who came, and I hope you enjoyed the reading. Please feel free to leave comments, in any post that you like. I love to hear your feedback on what I write.

Update, 4 hours later the publication of this article: It seems that many of you are coming to this blog from dzone.com… welcome and thanks for your visits! I have to tell you that, at the moment, my Google Analytics stats show that more than 700 people have come here today! Thanks to all of you!!

To Java or not to Java

Posted on by

I think I found the most violent and vivid, the most honest and Earth-shattering blog entry about software engineering I’ve seen in 15 years of programming:

I’ll give you the capsule synopsis, the one-sentence summary of the learnings I had from the Bad Thing that happened to me while writing my game in Java: if you begin with the assumption that you need to shrink your code base, you will eventually be forced to conclude that you cannot continue to use Java. Conversely, if you begin with the assumption that you must use Java, then you will eventually be forced to conclude that you will have millions of lines of code. Is it worth the trade-off? Java programmers will tell you Yes, it’s worth it. By doing so they’re tacitly nodding to their little compartment that realizes big code bases are bad, so you’ve at least won that battle. But you should take anything a “Java programmer” tells you with a hefty grain of salt, because an “X programmer”, for any value of X, is a weak player. You have to cross-train to be a decent athlete these days. Programmers need to be fluent in multiple languages with fundamentally different “character” before they can make truly informed design decisions.

Erlang

Posted on by

As I said before, I like to learn a new programming language every year. I also like to read at least 6 computing-related books every year, but the article about those 6 will come later.

The reason for these two rules is twofold: first, it gives me lots of material to blog about, and helps me refine my list of preferred languages :) secondly, and more seriously, learning a new programming language makes you think differently about problems. It’s not just something to keep my CV updated; it’s to challenge what I know, how I know it, and why I know it. It is important, and it’s not easy; and I’m not the only one to do it.

From all the candidates that I had for this year, I chose to learn Erlang. Here’s some of my impressions. Continue reading →