Reliably Broken
CSV sucks
For future reference: CSV is a terrible format for spreadsheet data. Any by spreadsheet data I mean CSV is a terrible format for text data that will be opened in Microsoft Excel (unless you only speak English).
July 3, 2011
Styling your Excel data with xlwt
This post is about how to create styles in Excel spreadsheets with the most excellent xlwt for Python. The documentation for xlwt (version 0.7.2) is a little sketchy on how to use formatting. So here goes…
July 2, 2011
VCS for Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
I am working my way through Aaron Hillegass’ Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (again). I find it a good book, despite the fact I’ve started it twice before and have abandoned my tuition twice before. I like to think my progression is an awful lot like young Luke Skywalker recklessly abandoning his Jedi training on Dagobah in order to save his Web application friends in the cloud city called Bespinternet. Eventually Luke (and I) will go back to complete his (and my) training and will become a truly great Jedi programmer for Mac OS X.
April 4, 2011
Adobe Software Updates
What Adobe’s software update site needs is: An RSS / Atom feed of recent updates.
March 3, 2011
Adobe's software update site is shit
This is written from the point of view of someone looking to keep abreast of software patches for Adobe’s many excellent products (also Acrobat).
March 3, 2011
Building Nginx 0.9.5 on Debian Lenny
Nginx is available in Debian Lenny, but the version in stable is the old 0.6.x series. Perusio maintains a useful repository with development versions built for Lenny, but it requires libraries newer than those in stable.
March 1, 2011
Caching a Django app with Nginx + FastCGI
I just spent a stupid amount of time trying to figure why Nginx was failing to cache my Django app responses. The Django app is running as a FastCGI backend and I have Nginx using the fastcgi_cache directive to cache responses.
February 28, 2011
Microsoft isn't totally evil
Pierre Igot complains about the font rendering on Microsoft’s Office for Mac product pages: Why does the web site promoting Microsoft Office for Mac OS X use, by default, a font that no Mac OS X user has on his or her system?
February 10, 2011
Weird App Store buttons
Screenshot of App Store.app showing title bar buttons out of place.
January 6, 2011
Running minidlna on Mac
These are my notes on installing minidlna, a DLNA server for Mac OS X. I compiled it from source and installed the supporting libraries from MacPorts.
December 16, 2010