The Tao of Mac

The PC market overview for Q1

Rui Carmo — Wed, 23 May 2012 17:59:52 GMT

iOS computers (i.e iPad) were 11% of the market, declining from 13% last quarter but increasing from Q1 u201911’s 4.2 share.

Eleven percent. Of the PC market. Am I the only one who finds this amazing?

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Android PC System

Rui Carmo — Tue, 22 May 2012 21:31:04 GMT

Has around the same RAM as my Nook, and ought to be able to run Android 4.0.

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The Voting Patterns of the Eurovision Song Contest

Rui Carmo — Tue, 22 May 2012 17:32:30 GMT

A lot more entertaining than the real thing.

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An iPhone with a 16:9 display?

Rui Carmo — Tue, 22 May 2012 17:27:36 GMT

I honestly don’t see what all the fuss is about. Makes perfect sense if Apple ever wants to, let’s say, “crack” the TV market with a view-on-the go offering.

The only caveat here is that the iPad would feel rather awkward if it adopted that ratio, at least at first.

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New Version of RStudio (v0.96)

Rui Carmo — Tue, 22 May 2012 09:55:27 GMT

I’m really starting to love this.

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Coda 2

Rui Carmo — Tue, 22 May 2012 07:16:33 GMT

Looks amazing. Love the “Diet Coda” moniker for the iPad version.

I just wish it had better Python support (Django anyone?)

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Leap Motion

Rui Carmo — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:14:17 GMT

Apple, buy these guys NOW.

Here’s a bit more. Looks amazing, and the price is certainly a matter of production volume.

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3D Printing

Rui Carmo — Mon, 21 May 2012 11:18:00 GMT

This is an update to an item originally published on May 18^th.

Resources

Link	Notes
Calibration Guide	The basics.
RepRap Utilities	A bunch of JavaScript tools to do useful calculations.
List of Firmware	Firmware for RepRap hardware
thingiview	JavaScript STL file viewer
Printrun	pure Python host software
ReplicatorG	RepRap/generic CNC controller, unfortunately requiring Java (source)
Slic3r	A Perl STL to gcode translator

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ATPM 18.05 - Welcome (and Goodbye)

Rui Carmo — Mon, 21 May 2012 10:52:49 GMT

Another end of an era. I’ve read ATPM for over a decade, and even though it’s not as relevant as it once was, it’s still sad to see it go.

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End of an Era

Rui Carmo — Sun, 20 May 2012 10:14:30 GMT

This weekend, after a relatively easy (if fiddly) migration to an aging Core Duo mini, I powered off my last PowerPC machine still running¹ - an old 1GHz Mac mini G4 that ran our iTunes Home Sharing service and a local Dropbox cache to speed up LAN sync to my laptop.

Its primary raison d'étre is that Synology, despite providing an iTunes-compatible DAAP server, can't provide a Home Sharing-compatible service (if there are hacks to provide that, it's probably shaky legal ground), and that I refuse to jailbreak my Apple TV to support other ways to access my media (such as UPNP or straight-up file sharing), so I have no alternative but maintain a Mac as front-end and store all my media on the NAS, which I then mount on the mini via AFP.

It's a trifle redundant and obviously slower in terms of overall performance, but works and saves me a lot of trouble - of course, I still wish Apple had come up with a decent, more open (and environmentally friendly) home media solution that didn't require a full-blown computer being on all the time (even though the mini will shut down automatically when there's nobody home, etc.).

Still, after years of dicking around with a bunch of alternatives (from the original XBMC to the WDTV), I still think this is the best overall solution for us, and with an unbeatable user experience.

But that's just scratching the surface. That mini ran pretty much non-stop for half a decade, and was a testing ground for a wide variety of hacks, ranging from many generations of this very site to firewall and traffic shaping shenanigans, and including oddball stunts like providing AirPrint services to my iOS devices.

For a while, it ran VirtualPC, QEMU and DOSBox to allow me access to insanely old files (Series 3 emulation, anyone?) and, of late, to (rather painfully) emulate an ARM CPU² as well as being my remote desktop whenever I ran afoul of iOS limitations and needed access to a conventional browser or a shell prompt.

The amazing bit for me, however, is not its flexibility - that is remarkable, but not that unique.

No, the amazing bit is that it managed to run an (impressively) up-to-date version of iTunes in Leopard right up until yesterday evening and without any loss of functionality, which is amazing if you pause to think that Apple is still supporting iTunes on PowerPC today.

And it would probably keep going if it weren't for the fact that I need something a little faster (photo browsing on the Apple TV was becoming a bit of a chore) and able to run Intel apps now and then - starting with VirtualBox to provide me with occasional access to a Windows desktop with sensible response times and a local Debian environment for testing stuff.

Still, it's sad to see it go. Apple's PowerPC range might be woefully underpowered in this day and age, but it was always remarkably resilient and long-lasting. I have a feeling the Intel box I'm replacing it with isn't going to last half as long...

I still have my original 800MHz iBook G3, but I haven't switched it on in a year or so. I suppose it might actually still work, but I can't be bothered. ↩
Surprisingly enough, it was rather faster than the NSLU2 at running Debian for ARM, even if dog slow to compile NodeJS. ↩

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R

Rui Carmo — Fri, 18 May 2012 23:32:10 GMT

This is an update to an item originally published on May 11^th.

R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics that I've recently started using.

I wholeheartedly recommend the the awesome RStudio if you want to get to grips with it, and looking into RHadoop if you want to hook up with your Hadoop cluster.

Resources

Date	Link	Notes
May 18	Rpy	A set of Python bindings to R.

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Summer, eh?

Rui Carmo — Fri, 18 May 2012 23:24:00 GMT

Allergy season is back with a vengeance, so after spending a weekend nearly senseless entertaining myself by dint of alternately sneezing my brains out and blinking bemusedly at the outside world while doped out on antihistamines, I spent most of the week's (rather short) evenings watching canned shows.

Plus I spent the whole week whipping Trac, rebuilding LAMP stacks and chasing down all sorts of weird bugs, sometimes late into the night. Not even time to think about industry news or jot down topics of interest.

So no real fun this week. But I've also been diving into R, which I find refreshingly straightforward - if somewhat quirky, given that its approach to tabular data is not quite what I expected (how the heck do these people cope with irregularly sampled time series? really?).

R is currently being hyped as the hot tool for data analysis, and given that I happen to have more than a passing involvement in Big Data, it seems the natural thing to get to grips with (even though I'll probably have a considerably hard time bolting it onto Hadoop and making the best use of it all).

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$74 Android "thumb" computer

Rui Carmo — Thu, 17 May 2012 21:37:38 GMT

Pretty neat.

Considering that the Raspberry Pi might as well be made of high-grade unobtanium (talk about disappointment) this actually seems like a good deal (as long as I can find a supplier that ships here).

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Siri declares Nokia Lumia 900 the best Smartphone

Rui Carmo — Tue, 15 May 2012 22:56:20 GMT

That had to be embarrassing.

Seriously now, I’d probably be forced to agree on many counts. I still prefer Windows Phone to Android any day, and would likely be pretty much OK with one as a corporate phone.

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Android Revenues in Perspective

Rui Carmo — Tue, 15 May 2012 13:26:51 GMT

According to an unnamed source, future Android revenue statements will be bundled with a magnifying glass.

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Python

Rui Carmo — Tue, 15 May 2012 11:53:00 GMT

This is an update to an item originally published on Apr 15^th.

Python is my current programming language of choice for most endeavors (even if only for prototyping). I am, however, not shy of using something else if it is better suited for the task.

It is also one of the main contributors to my occasional rants on the utter lack of an universal system scripting language.

My Stuff:

Yaki	my current never-ending opus.
MailArchive	a quick hack to file web pages as MIME compliant e-mail messages.
IMAP Backup	another quick hack that apparently filled a long-standing need.
Growl native protocol implementation	this spawned numerous variants, including a proxy.
PicoRendezvous.py	a minimalist (and dumb) Bonjour / Rendezvous client.
PNGCanvas	a native Python PNG creation module.
PicoStats	a minimalist Apache log parser.

Stuff I Help Out With:

The Python Grimoire, which I converted into TiddlyWiki format
newspipe, which I used daily for a couple of years and occasionally contributed to.
Snakelets, the runtime for Yaki

Testing Aids:

Testosterone, a testing framework with a great screencast
Pycallgraph, which can generate a program flow graph via Graphviz.

Resources:

Mac OS X specific Stuff:

Using Python with Quartz 2D on Mac OS X – an intro to the developer samples that have shipped with Xcode for a good while now
Python Metadata Importer – for Spotlight
BundleBuilder – to build standalone Mac OS X OS X app bundles

Windows:

Enthon, an enhanced Windows distribution with several scientific tools included.

Libraries:

Category	Link	Notes
Console	plumbum	Another command wrapper, with SSH support.
	pbs	A nice, simple and consistent generic command wrapper.
	Clint	A great module for developing CLI applications.
	Littleworkers	Parallel job management without the hassles.
	Colorama	Making ANSI color sequences work across platforms (see also this gist).
Networking	pyapns	An Apple Push Notification Service provider based on Twisted.
	gunicorn	A WSGI server for UNIX that supports a number of different worker daemons and is highly customizable.
	uwsgi	A C application container that speaks WSGI (and seems seriously kick-ass).
	msnlib	An MSN protocol implementation
	ircutils	A relatively modern IRC framework that uses `asyncore`
	Python smtplib progress indication	Might come in useful some day.
	RPyC	an awesome RPC library
	Eventlet	Amazing event-oriented framework
	dpkt	packet creation and parsers
	Pcapy	a packet manipulation library
	Tftpy	a pure Python TFTP library, useful for implementing UDP file transfer testbeds.
	ftputil	a high-level interface to the `ftplib` module
	telnetscript	a simple module to do scripted telnet sessions.
	FAPWS	a very fast asynchronous web server with a small codebase.
	simple non-blocking HTTP server	another simple server.
	PuSSH	SSH wrapper.
	POP	a POP3 class with neat semantics.
	PyRendezvous	neat little Bonjour module I use a lot.
	IPy	an IP address manipulation library.
GUI Stuff	kivy	A sophisticated UI/UX library with Android support
	pyglet	a cross-platform windowing and multimedia library with OpenGL support
	PythonCard	A bit basic, but interesting.
	urwid	A `curses` based library for building console UIs
	winGuiAuto.py	for Windows automation.
	VPython	3D OpenGL libraries for quick visualization.
Mail	IMAPClient	An IMAP wrapper library
Data formats	biplist	A library that can manage Mac binary `.plist` files
Data formats	xlwt	a library to parse Excel documents (cheatsheet).
Unicode	Unidecode	Does character transliterations.
Interpreters	Skulpt	Some interesting twists on using Python on the way to JavaScript.
Interpreters	Pyjamas
Reporting	Relatorio	A very neat reporting library with multiple output formats
Database	SQLAlchemy	See tutorial
	Sybase module	I’ve used all of these at any one time, and `pymssql` worked out better for me.
	FreeTDS
	pymssql
GIS	geopy	an amazingly flexible geocoding library.
HTML and XML	BeautifulSoup	The most powerful HTML parser out there.
	mxTidy	HTML Tidy for Python
	pygments	Python syntax highlighter able to handle multiple nested languages
	pyquery	A jQuery-like library for manipulating documents.
	cssutils	a CSS Cascading Style Sheets parser.
	Mechanize	a programmatic web browser for screen scraping.
	Gnosis Utilities	all sorts of XML goodies.
	lxml	a different `libxml` binding.
Web Application Frameworks	Bottle	Tiny, flexible, awesome. My favorite for 2011.
	Tornado	non-blocking, which is pretty interesting.
	Django	The new hotness.
	Snakelets	A minimalistic app server, my current web platform of choice.
	Draco	Old and busted, to various extents.
	medusa
	CherryPy
	Karrigell
	Twisted
	Zope
Graphics	smc.freeimage	A wrapper for the freeimage library that can handle various TIFF and fax formats as well as ICC color profiles
	Graphite	a real-time graphing system similar to RRDTool.
	SciPy	scientific (including plotting) libraries for Python. Most impressive.
	Pyx	Oldie, but goodie.
	Skip’s Python Bits	lots of useful snippets
pygame	a game-oriented library with SDL support
PDF	PDFMiner	a parser and text renderer that can identify location of text on a page and do basic rendering to HTML
	PyPdf	a PDF toolkit
	Kiva	a Display PDF library.
	ReportLab Toolkit	a pure Python PDF library that includes a presentation tool.

Techniques

daemon.py, an example daemon script.
Pydoc – built-in Web help, anytime, anywhere
How to Write a Spelling Corrector – an interesting technique that can come in handy to fix/suggest search terms, etc.
Python Webcam Color Track
Python webcam fun – motion detection

Notes:

Instant Web Server on port 8000:

#!/bin/sh 
python -c '__import__("SimpleHTTPServer").test()'

Totally Unrelated:

Estimating the Airspeed of an Unladen Swallow

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This Is What Developing For Android Looks Like

Rui Carmo — Tue, 15 May 2012 09:56:01 GMT

Okay, so it’s not really that bad, but anyone who says fragmentation is not a reality needs to get their head examined.

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Nokia's last stand

Rui Carmo — Mon, 14 May 2012 16:39:47 GMT

A worthwhile read, even if not exactly crammed with new insights.

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Apple changes name of 'iPad WiFi 4G'

Rui Carmo — Sun, 13 May 2012 19:33:54 GMT

Even though I’m very happy with mine, I’m still somewhat miffed they didn’t do their homework and built European LTE bands into the thing.

(In case you’re wondering, Portugal currently has 80% LTE coverage. For real.)

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Are Smart Phones Spreading Faster than Any Technology in Human History?

Rui Carmo — Sat, 12 May 2012 11:00:48 GMT

Guess.

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