netsmith

Objective C blocks

2008-12-27T20:31:00.000-06:00

Good discussion around Objective C blocks: http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2008-12-26.html

App store observations

2008-09-21T11:29:00.004-05:00

Having a few apps on the store, and having closely followed rankings, popularity and pricing over the past couple of monthes, here are a couple observations:There are still plenty of business issues (mktg, customer service, ip, taxes, etc) to deal with even though Apple takes care of some (distribution, payment, part of taxes). I think there's some opportunity there (publishing houses, co-ops?,

New apps on the store RSS feeds

2008-07-27T19:55:00.002-05:00

RSS feed for new apps on the app store:feed://webobjects.mdimension.com/iPhoneApps.rss- or -feed://feeds.feedburner.com/RecentlyAddedIphoneApplications-PinchMedia

Environment Optimization: Marco Polo + Synergy

2008-07-17T06:30:00.000-05:00

Wow. Synergy + Marco Polo = Lots of automatic goodness.I've got a laptop and a home computer which occasionally cross paths. When I bring the laptop home, I like to use both it and my home computer in parallel -- sometimes compiling/linking software on one, while doing research on the other. Synergy works great for sharing my keyboard/mouse between them. Now, with Marco Polo though, life

Interacting with GIT

2008-06-22T15:16:00.006-05:00

Git interactive rocks!It's a quick and easy way to stage several files [for a subsequent commit], regardless of location and name, without an IDE or ninja master scripting skills . . .example follows: [my typing in bold]machine1$ git add -i staged unstaged path 1: unchanged +7/-2 Classes/AllViewController.m 2: unchanged +2/-0 Classes/AppDelegate.h***

Time to GIT you a quick update

2008-06-16T06:32:00.000-05:00

I've either been living on an island, or I'm guilty of being a slowly boiled frog depending on how you look at it. Let's compare the default output for 'svn up' vs. 'git pull' shall we? My annotations are in bold...In this corner: 'svn up' . . .$ svn upU Classes/ClassA.m <-- _awesome_ single letter indicator forU Classes/AppDelegate.m <-- what happened to the file

WWDC 2008 wrap-up

2008-06-15T18:06:00.004-05:00

I just got back from WWDC 2008 . . . Unfortunately there is a confidentiality agreement that prevents me from posting any technical details here, but if you hop around the rumors/news sites, you can find most of the juicy details.In general, is was a very well produced conference. For me, the best thing about it was the chance to talk one-on-one with some of the engineers behind key

Does it GIT any better than this?

2008-06-15T07:32:00.001-05:00

Cool GIT feature of the moment: Content based tracking of files.I renamed a file in a project, and then did a 'git rm', and 'git add' to update the index and subsequently committed and pushed the changes. Then, on the origin repo, I executed a 'git status' to see what changes were pending. GIT displayed:# renamed: AllViewController.h -> RootViewController.h # renamed:

The Pragmatics of Innovation

2008-06-14T07:32:00.000-05:00

This guy is one hell of a speaker and he has a really great (pragmatic) perspective on innovation. The idea that people sometimes tend to look back at innovations without considering any hard facts is something of an understatement. Scott explains that true innovation comes from rigorous habits, not doing what you're told sometimes, and not letting past failures stop you. It's also

It's GIT'ing better all the time.

2008-06-10T07:30:00.003-05:00

Goals:I have some source code that I need to share between a desktop and laptop sporadically. When I'm working on the code on the laptop (potentially disconnected from any network for several days), I want all the same scm style capabilities (tagging, branching, roll-backs) that I get when I'm working on the desktop.I don't want the overhead of maintaining a server securely or paying for a hosted

Eric Schmidt - What can others copy from Google, how does his style compare to other CEO's

2008-06-07T08:03:00.001-05:00

Great video with CEO Eric Schmidt on a variety of mgmt topics, challenges he faces at google, and how he tries to facilitate the focusing of the energies of passionate engineers and founders. He alludes to what he thinks would be hard for others to copy, and what wouldn't.One thing in particular that Eric mentions is along the lines of: When you have smart people, encourage debate on anything

Attaining Agile Mastery -- Forget the word Agile!

2008-05-17T19:19:00.004-05:00

Here's a thought that has been bouncing around my head:To attain mastery of practicing Agile, try never again using the word itself to explain things you do or why you do them. Oh, don't get me wrong, the word 'Agile' is valuable for a assigning a name to the umbrella over those wonderful principles. But, if you don't know WHY those principles are important, when to make exceptions to the

From Tiger to Leopard

2008-01-27T19:45:00.001-06:00

Well, I finally bit the bullet and got Leopard at home (on a mac mini). So far, the transition from Tiger has been relatively painless. Here's a breakdown of the highs/lows for me compared to Tiger:Spotlight performance: +1; (usable!)General OS responsiveness: +1;Safari Speed: +1;Safari Reliability: -1; (has crashed on two different web sites for me so far! -- guess I'll go back to my

Don Brown is working on serious Maven 2 improvements

2008-01-27T19:41:00.000-06:00

Stumbled on this interesting work going on around Maven 2. Don claims to have reduced some maven build times significantly.

Links

2008-01-24T17:01:00.000-06:00

Tutorial on writing a custom wicket accordion/outlook style menu component: http://karthikg.wordpress.com/2008/01/24/developing-a-custom-apache-wicket-component/Options for showing an ajaxy 'wait' indicator in wicket:http://www.nabble.com/best-practice-for-a-wait-page-td15070792.htmlLast.fm announced you can now stream full songs and albums (from all major labels) for free...http://www.last.fm

Wicked Fast Wicket

2008-01-22T20:50:00.000-06:00

If you're familiar with Maven, I'd say you can have a wicket template project up and running with IDE support (if desired), in much less than 5 minutes. The magic is here:http://wicket.apache.org/quickstart.htmlIt uses a maven archetype to generate the project structure, and then you can use the typical mvn eclipse:eclipse or idea:idea to get your project into an IDE. 2 methods for running

Wicket is taunting me.

2008-01-15T21:27:00.000-06:00

After some vigorous hand wringing and what I thought was thorough forum searching, it turns out that no custom behavior/code is necessary to handle adding a browser-cache-stopping-but-not-totally-random-or-once-in-a-while-new-when-it-shouldn't-be url parameter onto JS and CSS links in Wicket. The magic line of wicket code which eludes forums and wiki documentation follows...drum roll...In your

Environment Optimization: Eye-fi + Smugmug. One step wireless photo sharing and backup (at full resolution)

2008-01-14T20:08:00.000-06:00

After recently acquiring an Eye-fi SD card for my camera, I decided to take the plunge and figure out a photo backup/sharing solution. I have relatives and friends that share photos using the various photo sharing sites (which inevitably try to make you pay for prints, shoot spam or advertising at you, and/or reduce the photos to a size that doesn't allow you to print a high-res version on your

Environment optimization: iCalViewer

2008-01-14T19:13:00.000-06:00

I've been successfully using iCalViewer for a little while now. See those nice little bubbles that are semi-transperant over my desktop background in the video below? -- those are upcoming appointments/meetings. I've found that this nearly eliminates the need for me to manually check my calendar on any regular basis. There are features to toggle which iCal calendars' events are displayed and

Environment optimization: Single Hotkey to large Terminal

2008-01-14T18:58:00.000-06:00

So I finally got around to checking out Visor. I'm already an avid user of Quicksilver which gives me speedy keyboard access to anything I can remember the name of. Since I use terminal so often though, it only makes sense to have a single hotkey which can summon and dismiss a large, visible terminal session. Here's what it looks like when you hit the hot-key (I choose Command-Tilde).

Here comes the Tardis

2008-01-12T21:55:00.000-06:00

A recent post on Patrick Kua's blog about explaining rituals compelled me to go add a link to my personal development philosophy page on my wikispace. That compelled me to review my wikispace. After reviewing my booklist , meetings , interviewing , and presentations philsophy pages, I had a realization. I have not been doing a good job of updating those pages with things I have learned and

Gadgets, Games, and Hardware

2007-12-29T15:25:00.000-06:00

Here are exciting things I got to play with first hand this holiday season:RocketFM - turns your pc/mac into an FM broadcaster. Any set of speakers with an FM tuner can now become a jukebox if I just set my laptop near it. Super Mario Galaxy - 5 stars !Good variety in level design and difficulty progression (easy if you've played mario games in the past though)Good intentional use of the wii

Google Collections quick intro

2007-11-07T21:36:00.000-06:00

Finally a java collections library that takes advantage of java 5 features to make code more expressive and concise!Some quick examples: Coding in the small with Google Collections

Software Professionalism - Autos (Automated Tests) make for sustainable, realistic software

2007-11-02T16:50:00.001-05:00

Statement: AWe, responsible software development professionals, MUST build sustainable, realistic software. I've intentionally chosen not to use the word 'working' in that statement. 'Working' seems to be a word that is easily perverted to alternate definitions. It's not enough to build software that works once! It's not enough to build software that can be judged as working after

Beyond simple refactorings and IDE portability of projects

2007-10-24T17:28:00.000-05:00

I recently did a short presentation at work on some of the java pattern based search and replace features that can be found in IntelliJ (SSR) and Netbeans (jackpot). The nice thing about these two features is that they let you specify a custom refactoring without worrying about whitespace or lines and you can match against more than just the raw text (i.e. - match 'where the base class is xxxx'