Category Archives: Open Source

ImageMagick

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ImageMagick is a cool toolkit; not only it’s a complete set of command-line applications, ported to Windows, Mac and Linux, supporting hundreds of different image formats, it’s also a C++ library that you can use in your own applications!

On Mac OS X, I installed it via MacPorts using the all-time classic:

sudo port install ImageMagick

Then I created a C++ command-line application with Xcode, set the header and library paths in the target properties (/opt/local/include/ImageMagick and /opt/local/lib in this case) and I was ready to code. The API documentation and the tutorial give some hints, and using those examples I’ve cooked a quick image transformation utility to play with:

[source:c]

include

using Magick::Image; using Magick::Geometry; using Magick::Blob;

int main (int argc, char * const argv[]) { Blob blob;

Image png;
png.read("pic.png");
png.write(&blob);
Image jpg(blob);
jpg.magick("jpg");
jpg.zoom(Geometry(100, 200));
jpg.write("newpic.jpg");
Image tiff(blob);
tiff.magick("tiff");
tiff.zoom(Geometry(3000, 84000));
tiff.write("newpic.tiff");
Image gif(blob);
png.magick("pdf");
png.write("newpic.pdf");
return 0;

} [/source]

Interesting stuff indeed! The API provides a complete set of “Photoshop-like” operations on images, which I plan to study further in the near future.

Symfony con MAMP

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estuve jugando un rato con symfony y MAMP, y esta bastante bueno, aunque hay un par de cosas que no me gustaron. aqui van unos comentarios que te podran ser utiles.

me puse a leer las instrucciones de instalacion, y despues encontre el tutorial, de donde saco gran parte de lo que escribire en este articulo.

ahi dice que hay un archivo tgz que podes bajar de aca. se llama “sandbox” (caja de arena) y tiene todo listo y esta especialmente destinado para principiantes.

lo baje y lo descomprimi (haciendo doble click) en el web root – yo lo tengo seteado en ~/Sites, mira esta pantalla de configuracion de MAMP:

entonces puse la carpeta sf_sandbox en ~/Sites/sf_sandbox.

como tengo el MAMP andando abris un browser y te vas a http://localhost/sf_sandbox/web/index.php/

primero no me anduvo porque tenia MAMP con la opcion “PHP 4″, y la cambie a “PHP 5″ y anduvo:

Continue reading →

wp-super-cache problem? Easy fix

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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.

Installing PostgreSQL 8.3 on Leopard

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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. Continue reading →

How to build ohcount on Leopard

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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. Here’s how I made it work in my own Leopard G4 PowerBook (PPC) computer. Continue reading →

Django Architecture Approaches

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I’ve just had a very interesting conversation with my colleague Marco about different approaches to the organization of code inside a Django application.

As you might know (and if you don’t I’ll tell you anyway), Django’s views (somehow occupying the “Controller” level in an MVC architecture) must take (at least) an HttpRequest instance as a parameter and must return an HttpResponse instance. That’s how it goes in Django, this is the law. This means that you must be sure that the last instruction in your request processing code (in whichever way you’ve organized it) must return an HttpResponse instance, usually calling the HttpResponse() constructor (or of any of its useful subclasses), or by calling the django.shortcuts.render_to_response() function, or something similar.

This has, in my opinion, a major drawback: it might limit code reuse and it increases the coupling in the code. Everything’s not lost, however. Continue reading →

SQLite Blessing

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I just found this in the SQLite source code, just fantastic:

[source:c::firstline(30)] /************** Begin file sqliteInt.h ***************************************/ /* ** 2001 September 15 ** ** The author disclaims copyright to this source code. In place of ** a legal notice, here is a blessing: ** ** May you do good and not evil. ** May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others. ** May you share freely, never taking more than you give. **

** Internal interface definitions for SQLite. ** ** @(#) $Id: sqliteInt.h,v 1.658 2008/01/30 16:14:23 drh Exp $ */

ifndef SQLITEINT_H

define SQLITEINT_H

[/source]

How to count words in LaTeX files?

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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 working on for the last two years, and creating documents is an important part of that.

LaTeX works for me, because:

  1. It’s cross-platform (and I need that for my project!);
  2. It’s text based (I can edit the files with any decent editor; personally I use and TexShop and sometimes TextMate);
  3. I can generate PDF, plain text, RTF, and much more from the same source;
  4. I can split my documents in several others and work separately in each;
  5. I can generate meaningful diffs using Subversion (to see what I’ve changed in every revision);
  6. I can manage the bibliography for my papers easily (using the awesome BibDesk tool);
  7. I don’t have to cope with a buggy text editor that crashes every so often!
  8. I can generate gorgeous, absolutely beautiful documents. Easily.

For my last document, the dissertation, I have a numeric limit in the number of words (~ 10K to 15K words) and I need to count the number of words in the documents I generate. Since I’m not using Word, nor KOffice nor OpenOffice, this simple requirement becomes more complex to fulfill. But working in a Unix environment has its benefits; first I found this solution:

$ detex file.tex | wc -w

This command provides a first approach to the problem; however, it just strips off the LaTeX commands, even those that generate content in the final document. For example, if you have a macro that puts in bold the name of your project, those words will not appear in the final calculation even if they do appear in the final document. Clearly not acceptable. Googling a bit more, I found what I was looking for:

$ ps2ascii file.pdf | wc -w

In this case we’re working on the final PDF document, and of course the final result is much, much more interesting.

Happy typesetting!

That nice freedom of modifying software

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One of the best learning tools I have found in my career is to take someone else’s code, and to modify it slightly to see what happens, to play with it, and eventually to release that code in this blog, or send it to the original author, fixing it somehow or adding some feature:

Continue reading →