Open Kosmaczewski

In the series of highly boring posts ;) here’s another one; in this case, a simple explanation of two different authentication protocols available in the HTTP standard.

HTTP Basic Authentication Protocol
This is the simplest HTTP Authentication protocol available:

The browser sends a request to a protected resource: GET /index.html
The server looks for the “Authenticated” header [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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:

import unittest

loader = unittest.TestLoader()
tests = loader.loadTestsFromName(’path.to.your.tests.package’)
for test in tests._tests:
print test._tests[0].__class__.__name__.replace(”Test”, “”)
for method in test._tests:
[...]

If you do not know ohcount, you should; the guys at ohloh.net have GPL’d one of their core components, namely the one that allows you to perform source code line counts in your own projects. Neat and useful!
However, the current ohcount distribution (which you can download from this link) does not build out-of-the-box in Leopard. [...]

It’s fun to find out how to tackle the same task in different programming languages; in this case, it’s all about doing HTTP requests over a network: fortunately, there are networking libraries in virtually all major programming languages. In my current project, I’m generating wrappers easing the access to the core of the project itself, [...]

This is an evening project that turned out to be really cool. Let’s say that you’re a Macromedia Flash designer, and your clients ask you to bundle your nice Flash movie as a screen saver. What to do? For Windows there are free utilities to convert a SWF into a screen saver, but not for [...]

Django has a nice support for unit and functional testing; however, its django.test.client.Client class does not support PUT and DELETE requests, which might be useful if, like me, you’re doing some kind of REST implementation using that framework. There’s an open ticket about it, but for the time being, here’s my wrapper that supports those [...]

I am a big LaTeX fan, mostly thanks to my friend Cedric who introduced me to it ;) And I don’t regret it at all; there is simply no better way to create long, beautiful PDF documents, particularly during these times of dissertation writing! I’m in my last step towards the Master’s degree I’ve been [...]