Tudor Barbu's professional blog

Iterate thru dates in Python

Tudor — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 14:06:14 +0000

Few days ago I was working on some python scripts that needed to iterate back and forth through calendar dates. Working with dates in python is pretty easy, due to its datetime package. Basically is like this: #!/usr/bin/env python import datetime start_date = datetime.date( year = 2010, month = 2, day = 1 ) end_date = datetime.date( year = [...]

Insert at the beginning of an array in PHP

Tudor — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 22:29:48 +0000

Last week, while programming, I needed to insert an array at the beginning of another. So, since basically I was just merging 2 arrays, I tried to do it like this: $originalArray = array( 1 => 'First item', 4 => 'Forth item', 5 => 'Fift item', [...]

New theme

Tudor — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:17:47 +0000

Got myself a new blog theme. The old one was getting…well…old. The design was made by Andrei Chirea. It’s still in beta. Some things may work “funny”, other may not work at all. Should work in Internet Explorer. Suggestions are welcome!

My Vim configuration

Tudor — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:55:28 +0000

Vim is the editor of the Gods. The Elder Gods. It’s by far the best text editor I’ve ever encountered. Although I’m not a “vim purist” (no hjkl ), I’m fascinated with its power. And there are always new things one can learn about it. It never gets old. For instance, today the head [...]

Django “anonymous_required” decorator

Tudor — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 11:12:20 +0000

I like Django’s login_required decorator. It’s a clean and simple way to allow and/or deny un-logged-in users to access parts of the website. But I also felt the need for a decorator to allow me to restrict access to some views only to non logged-in users. For instance, if an user in logged in, it [...]

Changing the time zone in Ubuntu

Tudor — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:55:22 +0000

This one is from the “d’oh” category. As recently I’ve moved to Barcelona and since Bucharest and Barcelona are in different time zones, I wanted to set my system’s time an hour back, in order to display the correct time. I went the easy way: right clicked on the clock in the upper right, [...]

Django configuration file

Tudor — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 11:01:47 +0000

I’ve been using Django for quite some time now and I kind of like it. It provides a fast – really fast – and clean way of doing things. When I first started with Django, I’ve used it mainly for simpler projects and kept the larger, more complicated ones on Zend Framework. That’s because I [...]

Gworld

Tudor — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 10:24:37 +0000

Is Google taking over the web? It seems so. Lately Google launched its own services to compete with other companies / open source associations on all fronts – DNS, source code hosting, url shortening, instant messaging, email. You name it and Google has it. Of course, not all Google’s services are top of the [...]

Help saving MySQL

Tudor — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 06:41:46 +0000

As you probably know, the most popular Open Source RDBMS, MySQL, is being acquired by Oracle, which – some say – will most likely mean the end of the open source project. MySQL has been eroding Oracle’s profits for quite some time now, and there’s a fat chance that Oracle will kill MySQL in [...]

Unit testing & TDD

Tudor — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 14:48:52 +0000

Last week, I had a discussion with Ionut – my colleague at Ninespices – about a piece of code I had wrote in one of our applications. The piece was meant to log the current user’s actions to the database for future reference. It looked something like this (more or less, the actual code isn’t [...]