Steven Osborn
"I would love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code".

Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category

Android conspiracy theories.

Tuesday, May 13th, 2008

Everyone loves conspiracy theories, so I thought I would share the latest. Some of the developers who entered Google's Android Developer Challenge (ADC) are accusing Google of giving MIT favorable treatment and an unfair advantage. Claims include extending the contest around MIT's class schedule, providing students with devices ...

Lamest “security” ever.

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

Normally I would abstain from pointing out security issues on other's websites, but since this bit of code provides absolutely no security at all I can do so with a clear conscience. The bit of code below is from my former banks personal account login. I quickly changed ...

Custom error pages in GAE/Django

Friday, April 11th, 2008

To allow for custom error pages (404,500) in Django/Google App Engine all you need is this bit of middle-ware that stubs out the request class for you so that it doesn't blow up. Add your custom templates to your template directory and name them 404.html, 500.html etc. Paste the following into middleware/errorpages.py class ...

Django manage.py wrapper script for Google App Engine

Thursday, April 10th, 2008

I'm used to running mange.py in my Django apps and I kept forgetting the name of the Google App Engine equivalents. My script only knows how to do two things at the moment, "runserver" and "publish" but now I can manage everything the way I'm accustomed to. Update: Aprill ...

Google App Engine Limitations

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

I'm really digging the concept that is Google App Engine, but I think they a little bit of work to do before I would be willing to put any effort into porting to their platform. Their marketing points for this include the fact that it allows you to build, ...

Google App Engine SDK

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

I just learned about Google App Engine a couple of hours ago and I have to say I'm pretty excited about what their doing. I really like the fact that they didn't go out and try to invent their own IDE and scripting language. I'm still really reluctant ...

Keeping Google’s Android Honest

Monday, March 31st, 2008

I just want to start off by urging anyone who is writing open source applications for the Android mobile platform to release their applications under the GNU General Public License V3. The Open Handset Alliance is about to wrap up the first round of the Android Developer Challenge and they're ready ...

iPhone SDK Sucks - Why Apple doesn’t have a clue

Saturday, March 8th, 2008

If you didn't run out and upgrade to Leopard and/or buy a spanking new Intel Macintosh, you won't be developing applications for the iPhone. Besides, unless you've done a bit of Mac development before, your going to be behind because iPhone applications are written in Objective C. Who ...

iPhone SDK is as Open as Google’s Android

Friday, March 7th, 2008

Although Android touts it's platforms openness; It is really no more open than any other mobile platform on the market as of now. You cannot download the source code for any of their components. What does this mean? Well, basically that they have YAMOS (Yet Another Mobile ...

Distributed Versioning - The new wheel

Friday, February 15th, 2008

With all of the great distributed versioning tools out there it's a wonder everyone is still using traditional client-server versioning systems like SVN or CVS. Especially when you consider how trivial distributed systems are to setup for small projects. Unless your hosting your SVN project with some one ...