May 2010
2 posts
3 tags
ZopeEditManager 0.9.7 Universal
If you do a lot with Zope and don’t like to have to use Zope’s ZMI editor, external editing is a godsend. Unfortunately the ZopeEditManager application for Mac OS X hasn’t been updated in quite a while. This is fine because it still functions well, but the problem is the most recent binaries are not universal. I don’t have anything else using Rosetta, so I’d prefer...
1 tag
Emulating iPhone Mail Compose View
There have been a couple of situations where I’ve had several small data fields along side one large body of data. The iPhone’s mail view/compose UI fits this model fairly well, and it’s something users are used to. The problem is that it can be difficult to emulate.
Taking a look at a MFMailComposeViewController’s view hierarchy can demonstrate why. One might think...
April 2010
1 post
2 tags
Rethinking iPhone Tabular Input
I’m unhappy with the standard input paradigm for tabular data on the iPhone.
The most common pattern is a UITableView inside a UINavigationController. The user selects a row and a new UIViewController that allows the user to edit the value is pushed onto the UINavigationController. When the user is done, that UIViewController is popped and the user returns to the UITableView.
If you have a...
March 2010
1 post
February 2010
1 post
2 tags
Infusion →
One area I felt iPhone apps lacked was in tea-timers. There exist several, and they’re generally pretty decent, but they lack a bit of configurability I’d like. So I wrote Infusion. The most important feature for me personally is being able to start a pre-defined timer with one touch after Infusion launches, but it’ll also let you customize the startup tab, add teas, edit...
January 2010
2 posts
Railo on FreeBSD with Tomcat and Apache
This is primarily written for myself for posterity, but maybe others might find it useful. I find myself wanting to play with Railo, an Open Source ColdFusion engine. Java on FreeBSD can be quite un-fun, but I’m going to assume a working JDK to start off with.
First thing is to get Apache and Tomcat installed:
cd /usr/ports/www/apache22 && make install
cd...
2 tags
Observation →
This is a little project I’ve been working on. If you’re an amateur astronomer with an iPhone, take a look!
December 2009
1 post
August 2009
2 posts
Rounding DateTimes in Cocoa
Let’s see here, what’s the currently supported way to round a datetime to the nearest hour in Cocoa?
// Round the current date to the nearest hour
NSDate * currentDateTime = [NSDate date];
NSCalendar * currentCalendar = [NSCalendar currentCalendar];
NSDateComponents * dateComponents = [currentCalendar components:NSEraCalendarUnit |
...
July 2009
5 posts
So, we had a little bit of a storm the other day. Nothing spectacular, or so I thought. There were a few limbs down here and there, and then I got home:
Lucky.
November 2008
1 post
2 tags
Thoughts on Blocks
Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the NIH
I’ve been interested in a few things lately with respect to web applications. The first is Seaside and its approach to stateful control flow through the use of continuations. Since I’d like to work in Python, continuations are not possible, but we do have something equally interesting, microthreads via Stackless Python.
The other is...
December 2007
1 post
September 2007
1 post
Loading C Plugins for PureDocs
I finally had a chance to sit back down with PureDocs, after getting the build process straightened out, and figure out how to load C plugins. Turns out, it’s pretty simple with ctypes. Let’s imagine I have a C library, compiled and linked as libtest, containing the following (a simple modification of my original example):
#include <stdio.h>
#include "puredocs.h"
Resource *...
August 2007
2 posts
Building PureDocs, Redux
After much trial and tribulation with Pyhton’s distutils and setuptools, I decided it wasn’t really appropriate to be building a C library with the Python tools. While the capability exists in distutils, it’s pretty obvious that it suffers from some pretty substantial code rot.
So, I’ve gone the autoconf route. I didn’t really want to, but really there’s no...
April 2007
2 posts
Building PureDocs
PureDocs seems reasonably unique in being a Python system that provides an external C library, the kind of thing that would probably be happiest with autoconf and make. Yes, I dislike autoconf, automake, and everything in between, but I’m writing an API doc-generation system, I don’t want to maintain a build system.
But, I naturally want a unified build system for the entire kit and...
Transforming XAR files with XSLT
One of the more interesting things about xar is the representation of the the Table of Contents (toc) in XML, with the ability to store “subdocs”, or additional XML trees, within the toc. You can easily add your own metadata to a xar file, in addition to its support for a variety of new metadata, including Extended-Attributes, both POSIX and Mac OS X’s.
Anyway, I’ve been...
March 2007
1 post
I had the opportunity to sit down and design a C API for creating PureDocs Resource objects this weekend. For the C API, Resource is an opaque type, and the API provides the ability to create a Resource, add properties, children, etc, without having to worry about it being a Python type.
The reason behind C plugin support for an API documentation generation utility that parses files based on...
February 2007
1 post
I Haven't Forgotten TracGantt
TracGantt isn’t forgotten, but it’s definitely neglected. I’m thoroughly convinced that putting tickets themselves on a Gantt chart, by using extra fields, was a fundamentally bad idea. The correct thing to do would be to use Milestones, which already have a lot of the implementation details that we were adding to Tickets.
I plan to rewrite TracGantt at some point in the future,...