I thought it was time to change the look and feel of this blog. Well, it’s done. And I’ve gone as minimalistic as possible.
By the way, no more comments. At all. Ever again. I’ve had enough of spam, hatred, flame wars, and idiots of any kind. For those who played the game, thanks for reading and commenting in a constructive way.
A happy life to all of you.
Markdown is my new favorite tool.
It all started while looking for alternatives to LaTeX to write documents and booklets, because since the release of the iPad last year, I wanted to publish in PDF and in EPUB format at the same time, and LaTeX does not offer that option off the box.
And, besides, I really found that LaTeX was a great system, but reading LaTeX code was not always enjoyable. It’s a bit of a messy markup language.
So that’s how I learnt about Pandoc; it is an incredible tool written in Haskell that pretty much transforms any kind of markup into another: RTF, MediaWiki syntax, HTML, LaTeX, Textile, you name it. However, it extends and gives a special status to Markdown, as one of its primary formats, and it provides support to create PDF and EPUB files out of the box; bingo, that’s exactly what I needed. Even better, it uses LaTeX to generate PDF files, which means that I can reuse my LaTeX knowledge to generate beautiful documents.
But then, learning more about Markdown (the syntax is not very far away from Textile, which I knew better), I remembered that StackOverflow uses it; that GitHub uses it; and then I found an excellent Markdown plugin for WordPress and another great Markdown Redmine plugin. Then I updated Elements recently on my iPad (an excellent Dropbox-powered text editor for the iPad), and found out that it had native Markdown support. And of course, both MacVim and TextMate have an excellent Markdown support, including syntax highlighting and preview. And finally, even better, I discovered that MarsEdit supports Markdown natively.
So that’s it, I’m sold. I’m writing almost everything these days with Markdown. And it’s a simple, pure joy.
PS: I’m even considering buying Marked by Brett Terpstra, or even Macchiato (although this last one seems to me a bit pricey).
I’ve just uploaded a new project on Github called delicious_wp: it’s a small Ruby script that simply fetches the items stored in del.icio.us the previous week and creates a blog post with them. You can set up a small cron job to execute this script every week, which is what I’ve done for this blog :) I know del.icio.us has a similar feature integrated, but it executes daily, instead of weekly, which is what I wanted.
To use it, just clone the repository, copy the config.yaml.sample file as config.yaml and edit its values inside. Run the script and voilà! A new blog post entry with your del.icio.us bookmarks.
The script can also be helpful to those wondering how to use the XML-RPC interface of WordPress from a Ruby script, or how to use the Net::HTTP library to consume a REST API.
[source:ruby] def get_delicious_bookmarks # Connect to delicious and get updates http = Net::HTTP.new(DELICIOUS_SERVER, DELICIOUS_PORT) http.use_ssl = true req = Net::HTTP::Get.new(DELICIOUS_DATES_PATH) req.add_field(“User-Agent”, DELICIOUS_USER_AGENT) req.basic_auth username, password response = http.request(req) results = response.body [/source]
[source:ruby] def post_to_wordpress(title, text) entry = { :title => title, :description => text } # Connect to WordPress using the XML-RPC interface blog = XMLRPC::Client.new(server, path, port) blog.call(“metaWeblog.newPost”, blogid, username, password, entry, true) [/source]
Enjoy! As usual, the code is released with a BSD license.
This is something I should have done much earlier, but hey, better late than never: akosma software has a new website and I’m happy to invite you to take a look at it.
Open Kosmaczewski will slowly become a more personal platform, as most of my future iPhone-related material will appear in the new akosma blog. After 5 years of operation, good old Open Kosmaczewski is by no means shutting down; but a new, exciting chapter starts here, definitely.
Thanks again to all of you for your amazing support, your comments and ideas. I look forward to continue serving you through my company, akosma software.
Today it’s the 5th anniversary of the article that would eventually become the first post of this blog. I was leaving Buenos Aires, again, and I wrote that on my old G3 iBook in the airport of Ezeiza, right before boarding. That trip was very important, for many reasons that don’t fit on a single blog entry.
Since then, I met Claudia, we got married, I finished my master degree and started my own company. Even hernún came to Switzerland! I’ve moved from talking about .NET to giving interviews about the iPhone. I’ve published as much text and code as I could, but most importantly, I kept on creating things.
Thanks to all of you, for your comments, your support, your ideas, your code, your critics. I’ve really learnt a lot during these years, and I hope my ramblings will be useful to you in the future as well.
Cheers! Salud! Santé!
A quick message to my subscribers: I’ve moved the URL of the RSS feed to FeedBurner, following the advice of my good friend Thierry Weber, so from now the new official RSS feed URL for Open Kosmaczewski is http://feeds.feedburner.com/kosmaczewski/feed.
Thanks for your support! Your comments, support and fidelity are astounding: you are a great audience! I look forward to continue serving you with code, tips, nice reading, and powerful rants in the future.
Update, 2009-08-08: for those wandering how to configure their WordPress installation to use FeedBurner, just follow these instructions. It includes a link to the legendary FeedSmith plugin.
This is the 600th post in this blog! It all started with this post written in the airport of Buenos Aires, coming back to Switzerland. And the news of the day is that, thanks to Donncha O Caoimh, the new WordPress Super Cache plugin now works with MobilePress, which officially enables a mobile version of this site.
Thanks to all of you who visit this blog (you’re over 6’000 every month!), to all of you who’ve left 563 comments (no mention of the 28,304 spam comments caught by Akismet) and I hope that my writing will still be of interest to all of you in the years to come.
Seen in Guy Kawasaki’s blog:
For those attending WWDC, and wanting to have the module complete schedule in iCal (as suggested by TUAW), I’ve created a small script (using Prototype) that will transform the JSON data of the official WWDC schedule into calendar files, which you can save and load into iCal.
This script was featured in another TUAW entry! Thanks to Mat for the link!
Enjoy! I hope this will be useful to you. By the way, if you’re attending WWDC, just leave a comment below.
Update, 2008-05-26: Thanks to Jeff LaMarche for posting a link to the calendars from the cocoadev mailing list, and to Second Gear for using the calendars with their own products! :)
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.