Thomas Pelletier

Apple hypocrisy

I’m a regular reader of TechCrunch. I’ve just read “Apple, There’s Pornography On My iPhone The App Is Called Safari. You made it.” by MG Siegler (by the way I’m a big fan of this guy, I really like what he writes). This article exactly reflects my point of view concerning recent Apple’s decisions. I [...]

Test of distraction-less text editors on OS X

Note: If you think that I missed a really nice disctration-less text editor, or that one of my comment is groundless, feel free to drop me an email. Competitors: Ommwriter Pyroom WriteRoom JDarkroom Ommwriter Ommwriter is developed because of an internal need at Herraiz Soto & Co, a digital creative agency. I like to call it the “Zen” editor, because of its default [...]

Dijkstra’s algorithm Python implementation

Here is my implementation of Dijkstra’s algorithm (also known as the shortest path) in Python. I wrote it for a project at school and put it there for memory only. Note: I don’t test the graph. Graph is oriented. If you want a non-oriented graph, you need to add vertices twice in your graph. May be improved (time). Here is [...]

Demi-finale au Prologin 2010

Concernant le Prologin Il s’agit d’un concours national français d’informatique mit en place en 1991 (et non pas 97, merci à Alexis) ayant pour but de tester les participants sur le capacité à concevoir un algorithme répondant à un sujet précis, ainsi que leur capacité à l’implémenter dans le langage de leur choix. Le concours [...]

Chrome vs Safari: my opinion

On my computer (MacbookPro), I have two browsers: one for web development and the other for the rest of my web activities. Firefox is definitely the best for my coding tasks, mainly because of its flexibility, its rank on the most used web browsers (please don’t ask me why I don’t want to use Internet [...]

Songbird: Music player for OSX

I hope you like The Beatles! ;) That’s it, I’m finally tired of iTunes. On my MacBookPro, it takes close to 3 minutes to cold start, and I see the spinning ball each time I click on its window. Such a pain! I needed to find a solution, quickly (well, I’m of those guys who don’t [...]

Writing articles with LaTeX

I had to write a quite short article for school a few weeks ago. I’m used to write my homework with Apple’s Pages, with always the same template I’ve built once. But this time, I wanted to change the look of my document, yet there is a bug I can’t manage to solve with Pages: [...]

Simple mail server report

Here is a small script I wrote a few minutes ago. It gather some informations from the local machine and send them by email to the administrator (me). I plays nice with a @weekly rule in Cron. It is easily customizable without further explanation. However, I think some enhancements should be added (multiple recipients, generic information [...]

About Apple’s Magic Mouse

In short: wow! I recognize my not really inventive attitude, but I think there is no better summarize about my feelings. Look Well, just by itself, the mouse is really beautiful. I admit it would not be worse with a soft white light coming from the Apple logo, or from the sides of the mouse, but I think [...]

Quicksort C++ implementation

Hello. I just had to implement a quicksort algorithm version in C++ for an exercise. Here is what I’ve done: The code on friendpaste.com #include <iostream> #include <vector> using namespace std; void swap(int &a, int &b) { int temp; a = b; b = temp; } int split_array(vector<int>& array, int pivot, int start_index, int [...]

Time Machine, FreeBSD and AFP are on a little boat

Okay, I just had set up a backup system from a MacBookPro (let’s say, the client) to a FreeBSD-powered server (quite boringly, the server). I chose Time Machine because of it’s nice and polished interface and its deep integration with OSX. After a lot of (too much?) tries and spent time, I chose the AFP for [...]

Test your django-piston API (with auth)

I have to build the API for one of my web service. It’s Django and django-piston powered application and it works well. Okay. I chose the TDD technique. So my problem was: how do I test the API parts which need authentication (basic HTTP, not OAuth for now)? The built-in test client of Django doesn’t seem [...]

Sync Google Contacts and AddressBook.app

You may be aware of some limitations you may encounter to sync your Google Contacts with your built-in Mac OS X address book, especially if you don’t have an iPhone/iPod Touch. Here is the most suitable solution I found to get round of this annoying problem. First of all, you must let your system think you [...]

Mint for fresher statistics

Four days ago I finally bought Mint, for pelletier.im. I used to use Wordpress’ plug-in for my weblog and Google Analytics for all my other projects. I decided to get rid of Wordpress’ plug-in because of its lack of flexibility and its heavy use of Flash. I didn’t want to come back Analytics because its [...]

Hey, I speak English too!

Photo credits: London Symbols by X it Or at least I try to. I know my English skills are neither really impressive nor even high. I think I am likely to make progress by practicing. In fact, I hope using English each time I write on the Web will be more efficient than writing every month [...]