List of posts tagged "programming"
- The state of Lisp development on Intel-based Macs
The transition to an x86-based architecture from PowerPC has been quite a smooth one for me. I'm not a heavy Photoshop user, so it runs quite fast enough for my needs under Rosetta. Office too runs quite speedy under Rosetta. Other than these appli...
- ASP.NET Rants and Raves
I've got a fairly positive opinion of ASP.NET 2.0. Microsoft has done a lot of good things with this platform. For instance, they have taken care of a lot of plumbing work that many web developers would implement incorrectly. Still, some decisions ...
- What software developers can learn from car mechanics
I've been meaning to write more about my experiences crewing on a Formula Ford team this past summer. I'm not a mechanical expert by any means. Given my interest as a kid, you might figure otherwise. I grew up memorizing the specifications for enti...
- Facebook Filesystem
Sometimes I like to work on projects that have no immediate apparent value. A lot of times I start these projects and get them working just good enough for my mind to move on, but just short of them being ready for public consumption. One such project that I'm working on right now is a Facebook Filesystem. It's a user-space filesystem built on top of Amit Singh's (Google) MacFUSE.
... - A New Look
Being a programmer, and one who mainly developers for the web at that, I have been embarrassed by my previous web presence. You see, I bought an off-the-shelf content management system with very nicely designed, but rigid templates, and used it to build my previous website. The software I used, Rapidweaver, is a great product. It is just not for a web programmer like myself for which the underlying HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and server-side scripting used to build a personal website are as much expressions of personal creativity as the words that you are reading now. My greatest fear was that a professional colleague would view source and see less-than-ideal markup! Or worse, a potential client would look at the site and judge my programming merit on the fact I didn’t even put together my own personal website using my own code.
... - The Apple Human Interface Guidelines
It was created in 1992, has been continually updated the past 16 years and is now 402 pages in length. Apple's HIG, short for Human Interface Guidelines, is unique amongst technical documents in that it is seemingly referenced equally as often by application developers on the Mac OS platform as by regular users. Ask a Windows user if the application they're currently using, say FireFox, adheres to basic Windows application design guidelines and you'll be met with a blank stare. Ask a Mac user the same question, and a significant many will sound off about just how poorly (in the case of FireFox) the application adheres to the Mac HIG. But don't take my word for it. Googling for the terms "FireFox Mac look and feel" yields many articles discussing the issue. FireFox developers have even gone out of their way with the latest version of the application to address Mac user's look and feel concerns specifically.
... - Accepted Into The iPhone Developer Program
Finally! I have been working on an iPhone application with the company that one of my mentor's (I hope he'll let me call him that) started. We applied to the iPhone Developer Program a while back but were not accepted into the initial batch of developers. That could have been a blessing in disguise. We have learned a thing or two from watching some of the first application developers make mistakes with pricing, execution, and simply having to deal with Apple's SDK.
... - Specifying Environment Variables (Or How To Use Env In Your Shebangs) With mod_fcgid
I recently switched from using a cluster of Mongrels on my Rails staging server to using FastCGI on Apache 2 with mod_fcgid installed. One thing that bugged me is that my dispatch.fcgi file would trigger the infamous Application Error: Rails application failed to start properly if I did not hardcode the path to my Ruby interpreter in the shebang of the script (e.g., the first line of the file appearing like:
...#!/opt/local/bin/ruby). I prefer to use the env program (e.g., the first line of the file appearing like#!/usr/bin/env ruby) so that my scripts are (fairly) portable across platforms where interpreters are located in different locations.