There are many ways to think through the flow of a program, and times when certain constructs like switch statements are a nice option, even in a language with no syntactical support for it, per se. Philippe Mougin was discussing just such options in F-Script back in the Oughts. I had a need for switching in F-Script, and came up with a few versions that I found useful. [Read more…]

And I'll even be speaking at it, together with the mighty Joe Pezzillo of Metafy and Push IO fame (and all-around good guy). We're giving a talk on the subject of open source on the iPhone. If there are specific points that you would like us to address, feel free to leave a note and I'll take it all into consideration. If you're there, please be sure to say hi. Please consider going if you've never been! It's more intimate than the larger WWDC. The Mac/iPhone dev community is great, and this should be a very fun conference.

360iDev — "the Premier iPhone developer conference" (April 11-14)

Here's a tiny adjustment to Xcode that made me happy. Using the app-specific keyboard shortcuts (System Preferences » Keyboard » Keyboard Shortcuts » Application Shortcuts) to make your workflow a touch quicker / more convenient. If you have a smaller keyboard, the key combos get more cramped and hard to remember, but I was just noticing how unused these higher function keys generally are. I'm sure you can suggest even better helpers. Of course, season to taste. [Read more…]

The ratings on the App Store have always been problematic, as all community-driven ratings systems on the internet are problematic. One very bad idea that Apple implemented was asking for ratings when a user deletes an app from their phone / touch. That this technique unduly skews ratings toward the 1-star side on lesser-used apps is evident when glancing thru the store. [Read more…]

This is just a quick hack example using F-Scirpt to add a feature to WriteRoom that isn't currently implemented. It's just one Cocoa API call away from doing what I want. This is not a permanent fix to my problem, but I thought it was neat enough to show others how F-Script can at least let you do little things quickly like this for those unfamiliar. [Read more…]

With things running smoothly with my SciPy setup, I have been having fun trying out new libraries. Here's just a short list of some that I have been playing with. [Read more…]

What follows is my collection of notes about installing a full 64-bit stack of NumPy, SciPy, PyLab, and all that entails on a fresh Snow Leopard system. If it helps out someone else trying to do something similar that would be great. If you look through what I've done and find things that could have been done better or in a more correct way, let me know. We will be building most things needed from source.

After trial and error, and plenty of the latter, I have streamlined the process down to installing the following, in order: gfortran, FFTW, UMFPACK, NumPy, SciPy and finally matplotlib (which includes PyLab). [Read more…]