Development
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Brent Simmons’ How Not to Crash
My friend Brent Simmons has recently written a series of blog posts—seven parts so far—on How Not to Crash, for Cocoa and iOS developers. Brent is an experienced and thoughtful programmer, and these are well worth a read. Most are probably useful even to programmers working in other languages. Check them out! How Not to… Continue reading
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Wolf Paulus: Installing Tomcat 7.0.x on OS X
Today I needed to start figuring out how to install an open source analytics package on my dev machine. It’s implemented in Java, and needed Tomcat. I groaned. “Great. Another complicated dependency to install,” I thought. Turns out that installing Tomcat on a Mac is actually pretty easy. I ended up following Wolf Paulus’ tutorial here.… Continue reading
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Change Lists in Git and Hg?
Version control and I go back a long way. Back in the late 1990’s, I was working in the QA team at Sonic Solutions, and was asked to look into our build scripts and source code control system, to investigate what it would take to get us to a cross-platform development environment—one that didn’t suck. At the… Continue reading
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Manila and the OPML Editor
Dave and I released some updates to Manila.root, the version of Manila that runs as a Tool inside the OPML Editor. Instructions and notes are on the Frontier News site: If you’ve been following me for the last couple of months, may have noticed that I’ve been spending some time looking at Manila again. Recently, I completed a set of updates to… Continue reading
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Fixed: Aptana Studio JNI_CreateJavaVM error
I’m looking at various Mac options for JavaScript / Node.js IDEs, and decided to try out the Eclipse-based Aptana Studio 3 (now part of Appcelerator). But I ran into a problem when trying to run it—I kept getting an error saying: The JVM shared library “/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk1.8.0_20.jdk” does not contain the JNI_CreateJavaVM symbol After much searching… Continue reading
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Porting to WordPress Part 3: Code
In the last post on this topic, I discussed some of the differences between Manila and WordPress, and how understanding those differences teased out some of the requirements for this project. In this post I’m going to talk about the design and implementation of a ManilaToWXR Tool, some more requirements that were revealed through the process of building it,… Continue reading
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Porting to WordPress Part 2: Requirements
In my earlier post about porting from Manila to WordPress, I covered some basics around how and why I decided on the approach I took, and some of the requirements for the new site. I’ve made a ton of progress—what you’re reading right now is coming from WordPress 4.0, hosted on my own server—but I’ve been remiss on follow-up… Continue reading
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Porting to WordPress Part 1: Scoping
About a week ago I started a project to port this site from Manila to WordPress. While there are probably very few Manila users still out there who might want to do this, I thought it would still be a useful exercise to document the process here, in case anything I’ve learned might be useful.… Continue reading
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Uncle Bob: The Start-Up Trap
A few weeks ago, “Uncle Bob” Martin put up a great post on the 8th Light blog, about the value of disciplined software development being just as important, if not more important, for start-ups as for established companies. – The Start-Up Trap: “As time passes your estimates will grow. You’ll find it harder and harder… Continue reading
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Code Formatting Style
A shout out to Brent Simmons regarding his take on code formatting style. Personally I tend to agree with Brent that opening braces at the end of lines is easier to read. Perhaps this comes from the fact that he and I both spent lots of time writing UserTalk code in Frontier’s outliner. Typically code… Continue reading