Open Kosmaczewski

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 [...]

I wanted to make my Django blog engine work on Leopard using MySQL as a database engine. I had a hard time making it work, partially because of my lack of knowledge of Python, partially because I am using MAMP instead of a “/usr/local/mysql”-like MySQL installation, partially because of Leopard itself. The problem is, basically, [...]

As I’ve written earlier, I’m playing with Django these days. It’s a refreshing change, I must say, even if I admit that I prefer Ruby’s syntax to Python’s. Of course that’s just a purely subjective impression (I’m writing this while I try to avoid the rotten tomatoes thrown by angry pythonistas reading this) that does [...]

If you use Django on Leopard, you might encounter a strange “Locale UTF-8 not found” error when running your application. This is due to a bug in Terminal.app, albeit an easy to fix one: just go to the Preferences pane / “Settings” page / “Advanced” tab and uncheck the “Set LANG environment variable on startup” [...]

If you just installed Leopard and the developer tools, you’ll find out that Ruby on Rails is there, ready to be used. But of course, it’s Rails 1.2.3, which is fine, but it turns out that last Friday Rails went 2.0. Not only that, but RubyGems was updated to 0.9.5 lately too… and you’re dying [...]

If you haven’t tried git, you should. Git is a “distributed version control” system, that is, similar to Subversion with the big difference that… you do not need a server. There are only clients, any of them, and you can pull and push changes to and from other repositories from your project colleagues. The git [...]

Just a small post, pointing to the one and only solution to a known bug, that (incredibly) shipped with the public release of the PowerPC version of the latest Ubuntu distribution: 7.10 or “Gutsy Gibbon”. When installing that OS on a PowerPC G3 iBook (like mine), during the boot sequence the computer “freezes” (that is, [...]

JUCE is a gorgeous thing: JUCE (Jules’ Utility Class Extensions) is an all-encompassing C++ class library for developing cross-platform applications. It’s particularly good for creating highly-specialised user interfaces and for handling graphics and sound. For Mac OS X (with the Developer Tools installed) and Windows (using Visual Studio 6, 2003 or 2005), the library builds [...]