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…that the monitors at the Chicago O’Hare airport are running Adobe Flash! 🙂

MediaMonkey (MM) is my music player of choice on Windows. I have a few global hotkeys setup (for instance WIN+ALT+B for next track), but after an upgrade a few months ago (probably starting with 3.0) I noticed that my shortcuts started sending the shortcut keys to the active applications. So, for instance, while in Outlook if I press WIN+ALT+B, MM will go to the next track, but in addition Outlook will switch views because ALT+B is a shortcut in Outlook.

After a quick post online I found the solution that I was looking for. Basically, I had to edit the MediaMonkey.ini and add “PreferLLKeysHook=1” to the “[options]” section. MediaMonkey.ini will be located in different places based on the operating system, you can find the details in this knowledge base article. Add “PreferLLKeysHook=1” to the “[options]” section in there and restart MM. From there on the shortcut keys will only be interpreted by MM and will not be forwarded to the active application.

Lately I have been playing around with Objective-C development on mac. As I was working through a tutorial I kept getting the following error for a calculated read-only property.

[<NSManagedObject 0x2000c3c20> valueForUndefinedKey:]: the entity Expense is not key value coding-compliant for the key "filename".

Below is the definition of the class.

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// Expense.h
#import <Cocoa/Cocoa.h>
@interface Expense : NSManagedObject {}
@property (readonly) NSString* filename;
@end


// Expense.m
#import "Expense.h"
@implementation Expense
- (NSString *) filename {
	return @"TestingPath";
}
@end

The class definition is OK so the error didn’t make sense. After some troubleshooting I found out what was causing this. Since this was my first application I didn’t know that I had to tell the model what class it should be using, and, unfortunately, the book that I was using didn’t mention it either (or maybe I missed it).

Anyways, if you get this error then make sure that you have associated the class with the model. To do this you have to specify the class name under “Class” in the model definition (see screenshot below).

I am very picky about my development environment and I need it to be just right, otherwise the fun part of programming disappears. I have a dedicated Linux server in my office that is sharing and serving the development files. This is a solid server, fast enough that django’s development server refreshes as soon as I save the files, even before I have switched to my browser; and that’s how I like it! 🙂 Lately I have been on the road quite a bit so I have had to run the development environment on my tablet (when in Windows 7; runs excellent in Linux). The tablet has OK specs: 1.4GHz Core Duo with 2GB RAM and a 7200 RPM drive (generally the bottleneck). But for some reason django’s development server seems especially slow at serving the files. The refreshes after changes are OK, not fast, but OK. It is the media that it is very slow at serving (understandably so).

I did a lot of research on my options to speed this up. I am using the standard CPython distribution on Windows. I saw a lot of references to unladden-swallow, but there weren’t a lot of benchmarks to prove the speed gain yet. I realize that this is still under very heavy development, but the one benchmark that I found really excited me so I decided to give it a try. Unfortunately, after hunting for a number of source code packages necessary for compilation and still not succeeding I concluded that it wasn’t worth the time yet 😐 I decided to rule out pypy because of the possibility of compatibility issues, I wanted something that I could plug into the existing system. For some of my projects I am using external libraries, which might not work with pypy.

Anyways, my solution ended up involving Apache. Based on the console output of django’s dev server I had an idea that it was slow at serving multiple files. So I decided to serve the media, which generally is the majority of the files in a given view, using Apache and let django’s server deal only with the views. Microsoft’s IIS is also an option, but I had Apache setup for another project so I decided to use that. Below is a part of my dev_settings.py that makes this change.

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import socket
# ...

# System specific dev settings.
if socket.gethostname() == "mystic":
	MEDIA_URL = 'https://thebitguru.com/projectname_media/'
	SERVE_STATIC_FILES = False
else:
	SERVE_STATIC_FILES = True

With this new combination and using 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost now my dev environment on Windows is fast enough to keep things interesting.

Haha, SBC! 🙂

As a programmer I know sometimes this is what you want to say, but what can I say, we have to live with backwards compatibility even if it means twice as much work.

I recently published the Wake-on-LAN client for webOS (used by Palm Pre and Pixi) and finally got a chance to create a video showing how it works. You can see it below. I had to write a Java dbus service to accomplish this functionality so, unfortunately, this won’t be showing up in the Palm app catalog, but you can install it using Preware. For more information checkout the WoL project page.

In the past whenever applying to a job I have tried to go a step beyond what the employer might have requested. In a few cases the requirement was C++, so what better way to demonstrate your skills than writing a C++ program? After some thinking I decided that a C++ based resume would be a good sample. So, I ended up writing a program that renders my resume almost exactly as it would have been rendered by Microsoft Word. Instead of hard coding the complete resume I wrote a text rendering engine that reads an array of string and renders it on screen based on some simple rules.

To make it simple for the hiring manager to run this program I embedded the text in a string array so they can just pass the exe around without having to worry about sending multiple files. The program works just as well reading from a text file. Here is a quick screenshot of this program.

So, what extra steps have you taken to increase your chance of getting an interview?

I just finished posting a new article about migrating a django application database from MySQL to PostgreSQL. This article is very technical and only covers the actual migration steps (i.e. does not explain why I made the move). Check it out if you are interested or curious.

Migrating MySQL data to PostgreSQL