Installing Windows 10 on a Mac without Bootcamp

 Posted on March 12, 2016  |  8 minutes  |  Fotis Gimian

Installing Windows on a Mac should be a piece of cake with Bootcamp, but that rarely is the case. In fact, I would personally say that Boot Camp Assistant is one of the worst apps that comes with OS X and unlike the rest, it doesn’t work seamlessly. A few of its drawbacks: It only supports a drive with a single partition. It often throws very obscure error messages with limited detail. [Read More]

A Simple PlistBuddy Tutorial

 Posted on June 27, 2015  |  4 minutes  |  Fotis Gimian

Good ol’ plist files. They are at the core of OS X for storing application settings and they work really well. If you have ever automated part of your OS X build or changed some cool hidden feature, you have probably used the defaults command to do so. The defaults command is great and is still recommended for simple things, but if you want to edit complex plist structures like arrays, dicts and nested structures, you’ll inevitably come across PlistBuddy. [Read More]

Selecting a Solid Code Editor

 Posted on June 6, 2015  |  14 minutes  |  Fotis Gimian

Hello guys, hope everyone is doing well. I’ll start this post by admitting that I absolutely love Sublime Text and already own a license for it. But, I’m a curious lad who likes to try new things and therefore I couldn’t help being interested in trying out the slew of new open source and also payware editors which are popping up. As you also can tell, I primarily develop in Python but do a lot of frontend work too, so CSS and Javascript are of interest. [Read More]

Running nose tests with plugins using the setuptools test command

 Posted on April 27, 2014  |  2 minutes  |  Fotis Gimian

The nose Python test framework is a really good choice for writing and running your tests. However, it seems that the author is deprecating the use of nose.collector which was used when running the test setuptools command: 1 python setup.py test Furthermore, even in its current form, the nose collector doesn’t correctly work with plugins such as coverage.py. The recommended way is to use the nosetests setuptools command instead. Though, this presents several problems: [Read More]

Better Python version and environment management with pyenv

 Posted on April 20, 2014  |  3 minutes  |  Fotis Gimian

In the Setting up Virtual Development Environments for Python post, we discussed the use of pythonbrew for managing Python versions and their related virtualenvs. If you do enjoy pythonbrew, then be sure to check out pythonz which is now the active fork of the original project and has resolved almost all issues that I had originally reported. However, there is another alternative called pyenv which has several significant advantages. Probably one of the biggest is the fact that pyenv doesn’t depend on Python 2. [Read More]