RSSiPad – first impressions
Apr 04
Mac apple, IPad, kindle, Mac No Comments
Yesterday I went ahead and picked up an iPad. A lot of people are wondering if it makes sense as a device. Here are my impressions.
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Figure out the encoding of a stream
Oct 02
Have you ever seen a stream of data coming from a network, and it has some European accented characters in an encoding you don't recognize? Sometimes bad coding practices or assumptions about encoding when pasting into documents make the encoding on the file not match all or part of the encoding of a document. This is a quick way to find out what encoding(s) match.
It's not fully automated, it still requires your eyes. But it can make a difference when you're writing parsing code and you don't know what to do with some edge cases. Maybe some code like this coupled with a spell checker inside the loop would give you some sense of automation.
FuzzyCom :: Using DTrace for javascript debug on OS X in firefox
Feb 10
Vincent Hellot over at FuzzyCom teaches how to use dtrace to trace javascript problems on a Mac (using a specially compiled Firefox binary for OSX). He hints at being able to do it with Ruby on Rails as well. Haven't tried this, but can't wait to do so.
This post aims at introducing the DTrace debugging tool in the scope of a javascript application. It won’t get too deep in the wide field of DTrace functions but I hope it will give you an overview of how DTrace can help to solve performance and debugging issues in your javascript applications
[From FuzzyCom :: Using DTrace for javascript debug on OS X in firefox]
Ruby Appscript – Sweet automation
Jan 23
Mac, Ruby Mac, Ruby 2 Comments
Yesterday a coworker pointed me to ruby's appscript. I have found it nothing short of amazing.
I love my Mac, and many of us like the idea of automating our software, until we try to use AppleScript to do it. To say that Applescript is professional developer unfriendly is an understatement. I like ruby but to make ruby and applescript talk requires sending strings to osascript in just the right way and getting the output from osascript back. Not a lot of fun at all.
Enter appscript. Appscript is a ruby library that interfaces with applescript seamlessly.
Quick and stupid: Don't set unlimited on the buffer size of Terminal
Jan 14
If you're a developer and use Terminal.app, don't set "unlimited" on the buffer size. After a day of using it heavily to review logs and whatnot your computer will be *really* slow. It's Terminal.app keeping in RAM what you did yesterday. Stupid and Obvious, but still figured I'd write it down.
Bindings, Outlets, Target+Action across multiple NIBs
Dec 15
I'm a total troublemaker. For my first Core Data app I decided to do something nontrivial (multiple windows referring to a single document). Of course nontrivial means that the Interface Builder can only help me so far. So now I'm stuck trying to get things to work out right. Luckily Patrick Geiller has put together a good explanation of how you can share multiple nibs across an application. Now all I have to do is apply this same data sharing technique to the NSDocument instead.
When using multiple NIBs, we need a common object that will share data among them. That object will hold bindings, outlets, target/action shared across NIBs.
[From Bindings, Outlets, Target+Action across multiple NIBs ]
Creating a Git project for XCode/Cocoa apps
Dec 15
You can always count on somebody to have figured things out before you.. Chrisopher Roach's blog has a nice quick setup guide to get your xcode project in a git repo (gitignores, attributes and basic git push capability).
Whenever I setup a new Xcode project, the first thing I do is initialize it as a Git repository and add some configuration to the project that will make using Git with Xcode a bit less messy.
[From christopherroach.com ]
And of course debate has already started on the merits of treating certain things as binary to avoid merging nightmares. <sarcasm>Don't you love XML syntaxes?</sarcasm>
Ruby, Folder actions and full automation
Sep 25
I routinely scan my documents as PDFs so I can keep them in a virtual filing cabinet (you know, the whole "paperless office" thing). I use my HP all-in-one software running on a Windows VM inside a Mac (sorry, but the Mac scanning software on HP is complete garbage in my opinion).
What bothered me about this was that all the files scanned always end up named "scan12345.pdf". Because of the way I file, I like having my things as "year/company/year-monty-date.pdf" instead.
Some useful OSX Applications
May 29
Besides the iLife Suite, here are some applications I've found useful lately. Here they are. I will update this in the next few days.
iBank Review
Jul 31
After my nightmare with Quicken I decided to try many different financial packages. I ended up deciding on iBank 2.3.2. I have been using it for a little while now and here are my impressions.