Open Kosmaczewski

Seen in the preferences of iTunes 7.7, just released via Software Update:

When enabled, it adds the following icon to iTunes:

(Highly geeky post ahead. You’ve been warned!)
I have found the very message that summarizes the beauty of Cocoa in a single word; see by yourselves, hereunder in line 47:

#import

// The interface of a person
@interface Person : NSObject {
NSString* firstName;
NSString* lastName;
int age;
}
@end

// The [...]

Version: 1.0
Author: Adrian Kosmaczewski
Date: March 8th, 2008
Tools: Keynote
Presentation: barcamppdf.zip
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported
This is a presentation I’ve given at the second Lausanne BarCamp. It gives a brief overview of the biggest problems caused by software glitches, and some simple steps to avoid it in our day-to-day projects. Olivier liked the presentation and [...]

There’s an interesting discussion going on these days on Ruby blogs about, basically, how to avoid one of the most common, annoying, easy-to-create bugs in any programming language: calling a method on a null reference (or pointer, depending on your language).

This single issue happens all the time, in garbage-collected and non-managed languages, static and dynamic, [...]

I’ve been playing with Dashcode today, creating my first ever Dashboard widget (something that I wanted to do for some time) as part of a whole project I’m working on right now.
Basically I’ve discovered that there are, roughly speaking (and please correct me if I’m wrong), two kinds of Dashboard widgets:

Those that you cannot resize, [...]

Give me an API and I’ll move the web.
OK, I’m actually building the API myself this time. That’s why so few posts this month. RESTful, featuring multiple export formats, secure, configurable, usable on top of any existing Django application. It can even generate its own wrappers in a myriad of programming languages.

I think I found the most violent and vivid, the most honest and Earth-shattering blog entry about software engineering I’ve seen in 15 years of programming:

I’ll give you the capsule synopsis, the one-sentence summary of the learnings I had from the Bad Thing that happened to me while writing my game in Java: if you [...]

Those who read my blog know that I tend to write about software quality issues fairly often; particularly about open spaces and my aversion against them :)
I thought it was time to group all those entries into a Wordpress category of its own: “Quality”. Feel free to check the articles in there, and of course, [...]

Introduction
Total Quality Management is one of the founding pillars of modern mass-production economy, of which the software industry is by far the youngest (and most rebel) child. This article will provide a short discussion on some TQM principles and about their applicability to software projects.

Introduction
I strongly consider that the following three items are of high relevance for software project quality:

Developer workplace conditions
Tracking data of past projects
Management commitment to quality

In this article I will give an overview of them, providing some personal experience about each.