jQuery Calendar Date Picker in Django Forms

A common problem that developers face in Django is to have a calendar picker.
Here's a simple solution how to set up jQuery Calendar Date Picker in Django.

./M6

It takes three years to build a business

A very interesting post about quiting your day job and own business expectations: It takes three eyes to build a business.

./M6

XAMPP & Skype Conflict

I've just found out that, in my Windows 7, Skype and XAMPP have a conflict.
Apache cannot start if Skype is running because it states that port 80 is already in use. When configured to port 8080, Apache does not start because port 443 is in use.

The solution?
Terminate Skype, start Apache, start Skype.

Weird...

./M6

MetaMod Placeholder Position Display Management

When using Joomla! sometimes one requires to hide some information, like a specific menu, or an entire position.

MetaMod let’s you do this in a quite easy way.
One can follow their documented technique of moving stuff from an non-existing position into the real position, or one can use a simpler strategy that does not imply having virtual positions and nor moving stuff between these virtual positions and the real position: MetaMod Position Display Management.

./M6

Translating Math Into Code

"Discrete mathematical structures form the foundation of computer science."

This opening sentence resumes the article about: Translating math into code with examples in Java, Racket, Haskell and Python, that show how math is translated into code.

./M6

Value Proposition

While reading about marketing and web site design if found this interesting small post about value proposition This is business centric, since it states why should customers choose you instead of your competition, and every business people should have that clear on their head.

Here it is: Value Proposition: A free worksheet to help you win arguments in any meeting. Don't forget to check the related links. ./M6

.Net Reflector

During a set of web systems migration, things went very wrong and a customer requested me help in setting the systems up again.
One of the systems was developed in the .Net platform, not one of my strongest technologies, and C#.
He was getting really desperate when I started helping, because there was already one technical person looking at it for almost two months...

We performed "pair debugging" in the production environment, since there was no development nor quality environment available.
One of the first things I've detected was that the application that did not work referenced another application, which was not available. Fortunately, that project was available as an assembly, so all that was required was to include the assembly in the configuration file and we were ready for the next challenge.

The next challenge was not easier to detect, since the errors reported mentioned a missing log directory. The problem, though, was not caused by the missing directory. Any error that occurred was logged, but since the log was not working, it reported a directory not found.
Scanning the configuration for the debug location, we tried "./debug", expecting that the debug directory to be relative to project. Unfortunately, that was not the case!
The debug was managed by the previously stated external project, so I needed to see the what the debug code was doing in order to understand how to solve the problem.
The solution came from .Net Reflector, a great tool that allows one to open a library and navigate through its source code.
After a while I was able to understand how the debug file was being written. The programmer that coded the open debug file function was lazy, in a pejorative sense, was did not account for a relative path, forcing one to configure the debug file location with a full path statement, which is not straightforward when one is using a common web hosting service...

Fortunately, soon after, I was able to discover the full path for the application, so we specified the debug path as "c:\..." and things start rolling.

If it wasn't for .Net Reflector, I would have taken a lot more time to find out why the "./debug" value was being ignored and the debug file was trying to be written in "c:\windows\...".
It's a great tool for all serious .Net developers, I truly recommend it.

./M6