Open Kosmaczewski

You might remember my beloved mantras: learning a new programming language and reading at least 6 relevant books every year. Following the 2007 edition, here’s the list of the 8 books I have enjoyed most in 2008, ordered by a purely subjective and absolutely irrational decreasing preference. I strongly recommend all of them!
Winner: Geekonomics: The [...]

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, [...]

Generics in JavaScript.
Who came up with this? Let’s put things in context: JavaScript is a dynamic language. It turns out that this characteristics deeply upsets many people, particularly those who prefer to rely on a compiler to check their code for them before running it. It turns out that these guys also have a hard [...]

Back in 2004 I drafted a content management system based on PHP and AJAX, featuring ideas borrowed from everywhere and that, all in all, formed a rather coherent set. I wrote the system in a couple of days, in my daily commuting between Lausanne and Geneva, and it was called Propano.

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:

I fixed [...]

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 [...]