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lundi 11 août 2008

Raytracing with Mono on Mac OS X

A while ago, Luke Hoban implemented a ray-tracing sample application. I have made a Cocoa port of this application by using the Monobjc bridge, and it was over in less than one hour. Here is a screenshot:

Ray Tracer Application in Cocoa

The source code is available into the Monobjc all-in-one archive.

jeudi 13 mars 2008

Never trust a computer you can't lift

"Today, I met an IBM mainframe. Never trust a computer you can't lift" (via Maceinstein)

vendredi 15 février 2008

Time Machine Icon in Menu Bar

Since Mac OS X 10.5.2, there is a Time Machine Icon in the Menu Bar. Have you ever noticed that when a backup is in progress, the icon's clock goes backward ?

mercredi 13 février 2008

Extracting iLBC code from RFC 3951

iLBC (internet Low Bitrate Codec) is a free speech codec suitable for robust voice communication over IP. It is provided as freeware under a royalty-free licence from Global IP Solutions. This codec is used within Skype for the sound transport.

One nice thing is that Global IP Solutions has setup a developer community which provides everything for the iLBC implementation and distribution and they also have submitted two Requests For Comment (RFC 3951 and RFC 3952) related to iLBC codec.

Unfortunately, the source code is not available as a tarball, but it is embedded in the RFC 3951. Yes, it is embedded. You can find various Open Source projects that have extracted the source code and embedded it in their source trunk. But if you want to use the code from the RFC you have to extract it yourself, and the best way is Awk scripting. Here is the script:

# extract.awk
BEGIN { srcname = "nothing"; }
{ if (/^A\.[0-9][0-9]*\.  [a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z_0-9]*\.[ch]/) {
    if (srcname != "nothing")
      close(srcname);
    srcname = $2;
    printf("creating source file %s\n", srcname);
  }else if (srcname != "nothing") {
    if (/Andersen\, et al\./ || /Internet Low Bit Rate Codec *December 2004/)
      printf("skipping %s\n", $0);
    else
      print $0 >> srcname;
  }
}
END {
  printf("ending file %s\n", srcname);
  close(srcname);
}

Put the RFC text and the script in the same folder and run the following comand:

awk -f extract.awk rfc3951.txt

Et Voilà !!!

jeudi 17 janvier 2008

Monobjc is alive (hourray)

After six month of casual development, I am pleased to announce the Monobjc project. The Monobjc project provides a .NET/Objective-C bridge that can be used to add the power of the Mac OS X API (Cocoa, CoreGraphics, WebKit, QuickTime, etc) to .NET application (thanks to Mono).

mercredi 21 novembre 2007

What I really like about Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

I recently successfully upgrade my MacBook to the new version of Mac OS X, also known as Leopard. After one hour, I had a ready to go system, without any problem.

I think Leopard is a great upgrade especially for:

  • The Finder is now very smart and responsive. The search is amazingly fast and QuickLook is very handy, especially on text documents and images.
  • Time Machine is one of the killer feature that makes backup a breeze. The initial backup is pretty long, but after that, it is very stealth. and the Time Machine animations are REALLY cool.
  • Spaces is very handy, and its integration is nicely done. Moving a window from a space to another space is simply as dragging and dropping .Maybe, an permanent overview of the spaces will be neat.
  • In Terminal, you can now have tabs, which reduces the screen pollution. Another feature long seen before in Linux.
  • And what I like, is that EVERYTHING seems to go faster than in Tiger. It is totally subjective.

So, my piece of advice is go and get it.

It's a Geek Geek World #5458

It's a Geek Geek World.

mercredi 14 novembre 2007

It's a Geek Geek World #5449

It's a Geek Geek World.

mardi 13 novembre 2007

Change the large size of dock icons

While testing the glass effect on the MacOS Dock on Leopard, I was suprised to see a curious parameter in com.apple.dock.plist. It is related to the large size of the dock icons when magnification is enabled. The preferences pane let you set this value to 128 at most, but you can put arbitrary value in the plist file.

defaults write com.apple.dock largesize -int 256
killall Dock

And your dock will show bigger icons. To revert to a normal size, open the Dock Preferences Pane.

mercredi 7 novembre 2007

It's a Geek Geek World #5073

It's a Geek Geek World.

mercredi 31 octobre 2007

It's a Geek Geek World #5136

It's a Geek Geek World.

mercredi 24 octobre 2007

It's a Geek Geek World #5244

It's a Geek Geek World.

mercredi 17 octobre 2007

It's a Geek Geek World #5958

It's a Geek Geek World.

mercredi 10 octobre 2007

It's a Geek Geek World #5581

It's a Geek Geek World.

mercredi 19 septembre 2007

Phrase du jour

Evidemment, hors contexte, c'est encore plus drôle : "Fermer les commentaires [de son blog], c’est comme désirer secrètement le corps de Nicolas Sarkozy : on l’a tous fait un jour (si)" (Sur BienBienBien evidemment).