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Ralsina.Me — Roberto Alsina's website

Lateral Opinion's greatest hits

Since this blog just broke the 100K vis­i­tors bar­ri­er yes­ter­day (although it had about 150K more when it was lat­er­al.pyc­s.net), it's a good time to re­vis­it some of the old stuff that was some­what good.

So here are (IMVHO) the best ten things I re­mem­ber writ­ing in this blog in the last 7 years.

  1. Data-aware wid­gets in PyQt

    This ar­ti­­cle de­scribes a cool (a­­gain, IMVHO) way to im­­ple­­ment DB-backed apps us­ing PyQt. It's short, work­ing code and you end be­ing able to cre­ate neat stuff. I liked it, noone else did.

  1. Be a good lamar­ck­­ian frog­­gy

    It has it al­l! Evo­lu­­tion the­o­ry (the­o­ries)! It pre­­tends to pro­­vide in­­sights in­­­to FLOSS! Movie-­crit­ic-­­like quotes in the com­­ments!

    best blog i've read in a long, long time.

    —Aaron Sei­­go

  1. Rapid Ap­­pli­­ca­­tion de­vel­op­­ment us­ing PyQt and Er­ic3 ... in re­al­­time!

    An orig­i­­nal premise, a semi-use­­ful app writ­ten, got good re­views. I still like it, but sad­­ly it's not a for­­mat that ages well, since you can't up­­­date the tu­­to­ri­al for new­er ver­­sions of PyQt.

  1. Squid au­then­ti­­ca­­tion via POP or IMAP

    It solves a re­al prob­lem, does it el­e­­gan­t­­ly, and I still am in­­stalling it.

  1. Shared: Nar­­nia, The Da Vin­­ci Code is Bro­ken., Kong at dawn, Ma­trix Rev­o­lu­­tions, Troy (not Mc­­Clure), Dou­ble fea­­ture at the Elec­tric

    I some­­times try to "re­view" movies in an odd­­ball way. Please read them if you saw the movies. I think I made sense.

  1. Skele­­tons of sto­ries that won't ev­er be writ­ten.

    I have no idea why I wrote it, but I still like it.

  1. The world cup and I

    Too sen­ti­­men­­tal, but hey, I did feel that way.

  1. Fro­­do as a Hack­­er

    The sub­­ti­­tle is "Shame­­less ex­­plo­­sion of nerdi­­tude." and it is that. I am at the same time very ashamed of writ­ing it, and rather amazed by it.

  1. The Lin­ux Boot­ing Process Un­veiled

    One of my most pop­u­lar ar­ti­­cles. It's even cit­ed as a re­f­er­ence on Lin­ux boot­ing in Wikipedi­a! (I ed­it­ed it be­­cause they had the link wrong, though). It was even copied with­­out atri­bu­­tion a cou­­ple of times.

  1. A Mod­­est Us­a­bil­i­­ty Im­prove­­ment

    Oth­­er ar­ti­­cles had more links, more views, or more com­­ments, but this ar­ti­­cle in­­spired the cre­a­tion of two new apps that are much bet­ter than what was around be­­fore I wrote it, which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy in­­sid­e. So, check it out, then use Speed­crunch or Abakus in­­stead of kcalc (or win­­cal­c).

RIP Norman Mailer

He was fa­mous, he wrote 30 book­s, he got to sleep with Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe, and he still had time to pro­vide some of the best anec­dotes ev­er.

Check them out at 10 Zen Mon­keys

Windows: my eXPerience

Can you be a com­put­er con­sul­tant and gen­er­al­ly a com­put­er guy with­out ev­er in­stalling win­dows?

I man­aged for over 12 years... un­til this week.

Coming soon...

I have man­aged to cre­ate the most bizarre way to write a spread­sheet en­gine in Python.

I still need to pol­ish some things, but here are the high­light­s:

  • Your for­­mu­las com­pile to C

  • C is in­­­lined us­ing In­­s­tant

Yes, that means you ed­it a cell in the GUI and you need to wait un­til gcc com­piles the thing.

Is it go­ing to be use­ful? Prob­a­bly not. Is it cool? I say yeah.

I will pol­ish it some­what, cre­ate a sttan­dalone en­gine, and show it here.


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