Posts

TypeScript 2.1 introduced a number of breaking changes, among them that “Extending built-ins like Error, Array, and Map may no longer work”. For a subclass like the following: class FooError extends …

The Chaos Computer Congress is Europe’s leading hacker and tech community conference, taking place annualy in Hamburg, Germany between Christmas and New Year. This year was the 33rd time (hence 33C3), …

Peter Norvig, the famous American computer scientist and Director of Research at Google Inc., participated in this year’s Advent of Code (a series of small programming puzzles), and shared his …

A thread pool is a group of pre-instantiated, idle threads which stand ready to be given work. These are often preferred over instantiating new threads for each task when there is a large number of …

A simple guide on installing the latest Qt (currently 5.6) and PyQt5 on Mac OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) and Linux with Python 3.4, inside a virtual environment.

Easily find broken hyperlinks in PDF documents with PDFx, a free tool to extract references and metadata from PDFs.

Round-up and comparison of several popular and free transactional email services and Mandrill alternatives.

This is a simple and effective method how to serve Wordpress pages blazingly fast: produce static HTML files with WP Super Cache, and serve them directly with nginx. WP Super Cache (on Github) is an …

Let's Encrypt is a new certificate authority backed by Mozilla, Akamai, EFF, Facebook and others, which provides free SSL/TLS certificates. This is an overview and comparison of 10 popular clients.

In this tutorial we’ll be using py2app to create a standalone OSX application from a Python 2 or 3 source code with a simple Tkinter user interface. "py2app is a Python setuptools command which will …

String encoding and decoding as well as encoding detection can be a headache, more so in Python 2 than in Python 3. Here are two little helpers which are used in PDFx, the PDF metadata and reference …

Machine learning algorithms regularly utilize GPUs to parallelize computations, and Amazon AWS GPU Instances provide cheap and on-demand access to capable virtual servers with NVIDIA GPUs. GPU …

Great talk and engaging live coding session “Python Concurrency From the Ground Up” by David Beazley at PyCon 2015! Recommended 47 minutes watch. A few selected quotes: The fact that he walked in and …

I just released PDFx version 1.0, a Python tool and library to extract metadata and URLs from PDFs, and to automatically download all referenced PDFs. The project is released under the Apache license …

This post is about using Retrofit 2.0 (beta) to consume HTTP based APIs. Retrofit is a great and popular API client library for Java (and by extension also for Android) developed by Square. Here’s a …

Another DMCA takedown of one of my Android apps. This time initiated by The New York Times Company for a three year old app titled “NYTimes Article Search”. Instead of having their lawyers send the …

Just a year ago Paul Irish and several contributors started working on html5-boilerplate, a popular repository of boilerplate and best practices for creating cross-browser compatible, html5-enabled …

I recently started appengine-boilerplate, a repository of often used boilerplate code for Google’s App Engine, which allows to quickly setup new projects without having to re-invent the most common …

Short answer: Ask your especially engaged users to rate the app (eg. with a tool such as AppRater). iPhone developer Amro Mousa published a post yesterday with recommendations about how to reach a …

Developing servers that scale is usually quite tricky, even more so with Python and the absence of worker threads which can run on multiple cpu cores [1]. A possible solution are worker processes that …

This post is a brief technival overview of Unicode, a widely used standard for multilingual character representation, and the family of UTF-x encoding algorithms. First a brief introduction to …

Here’s a brief but important advice for Android app developers: starting with your first app, prepare for the situation where a company wants to acquire one of your applications. Use a unique signing …

I’ve just learned about a particularly nice Linux shell command: compgen $ compgen -c … list all the commands you could run. $ compgen -a … list all the aliases you could run. $ compgen -b … list all …