programming

This is more for me than for you. I love Git, but some of the most useful commands are incredibly idiosyncratic, involving various flags or punctuation ("git push remote :branch-you-want-to-remov… »

There's one small change that comes with OSX 10.7 (Lion) that I'm finding fascinating from a user interface perspective: the reversal of scrolling direction with the touchpad. By default in Lion, when… »

It had been a while since I'd worked on my current OSX app. The code seemed strange and unfriendly. But after a few hours of re-introducing myself to everything I'd written over the last year, I manag… »

One of the things I like about the Ruby community is that it seems to attract and even encourage eclecticism. I suppose it was only a matter of time, then, before a book like (Practical Ruby Projects:… »

Earlier this week, I built my first EC2 server from one of our templates, following (as far as I can tell) RightScale's best practices. It was to be our Continuous Integration Server, which runs our e… »

The last time I posted about this particular gem, my spam increased a thousand-fold and my blog became forever tied to the search term. You'd think I would have learned my lesson. But alas, kind reade… »

Despite not being completely blown away with it (the "it's indistinguishable from magic" propaganda from Apple was a bit much, even though I think the company is probably still the most inno… »

So, there's a certain type of test that's been failing in the M7 code, and I've been working on it all day long. It has to do with the Erector 0.5.1 gem from Pivotal Labs. Now, they've since moved on … »

Thursday night, there were 136 failing tests left on the M7 test suite. As of this morning, that number is 90. 46 fixed tests in 3 days. Not bad! Of course, 1.5 of those days consisted of trying to fi… »

I think you could make a very compelling argument that programming is simply the practice of making trade offs. Minute after minute, day after day, week after week, we're presented with these tiny lit… »