Oct 25 — 1
Alan Pinstein recently sent me an email about a Cocoa-inspired framework he's written in PHP, called Phocoa. It's a bit different from DataCruxWeb in that it doesn't include its own persistence engine, but includes Propel instead. Peristence is at the core of what DataCruxWeb does, but there's still some overlap with Phocoa. Both use PHP5 and integrate with
Oct 24 — 4
I'm muddling my way through production deployment for Rails. There are quite a few options. I'd eventually like to get over to lighttpd, but I need to stick with Apache 2 for now. With that decided, it looks like I can choose from the following
Oct 23 — 3
I'm trying to figure out how to implement some basic human-readable validation in Rails, and I'm hitting some speed bumps. First, the built-in error_messages_for() is pretty good, but the header isn't very human
Oct 23 — 3
I somehow missed Zend's announcement the other day that it will publish an open source framework for PHP. The overview page mentions "extreme simplicity" in three different places. It will interesting to see how this will turn out when it arrives, but I haven't been able to find much in the way of details yet. My standards are pretty high
Oct 21 — 3
I got to play with one of the new iMacs briefly at a friend's house last night. The external design is clever. The remote control magnetically snaps into place on the side of the case and the iSight camera is almost invisible, though a small green light comes up on when
Oct 20 — 4
I found and installed the Payment gem for Ruby, and fortunately it's built for the payment gateway I'm using, Authorize.net. The problem is that it doesn't seem to handle the "fingerprint" fields that are described in the Authorize.net SIM guide. Here's an excerpt
Oct 20 — 3
The iPod showed up yesterday. The screen really is nice. I don't have a 4G handy to do a side-by-side comparison, but it seems noticeably brighter and clearer than the 4G 'pod. Even though the screen is only a bit bigger, the difference is tangible. Between the screen size, the black exterior and the thinner body, the entire thing feels more slick. The UI also feels (photos included)
Oct 18 — 2
Twice now, I've ordered something from the Apple Store, paid for overnight shipping, and then have it not show up on schedule. In both cases, Apple was happy to refund my shipping charge, but it begs the question -- what's the deal?
Looking at the FedEx site, it seems as if the package is being treated as a 3-4 package, so somehow the 'overnight' label does't survive the order's transition from the Apple Store to FedEx. Has anyone else seen this?
Looking at the FedEx site, it seems as if the package is being treated as a 3-4 package, so somehow the 'overnight' label does't survive the order's transition from the Apple Store to FedEx. Has anyone else seen this?
Oct 17 — 3
This author might just be looking for publicity, or perhaps he feels he has a real point. In any case, this article claims Apple receives too much interest from the press. That's the stated point. To me, though, it seems the real goal of the story is for the author to criticize Apple for not seeing things the way he does
Oct 12 — 4
I found this post via Boing Boing. Essentially, it suggests that music labels should have Apple remove DRM from the songs it sells. As nice as this would be for people who like free music -- that is, almost everyone except the record companies -- it's just not going to happen. The idea with iTunes DRM is to make it inconvenient to copy music
Oct 11 — 4
The error reporting for the MySQL query parser can be pretty brutal. For example:
The table definition above generates this error
create table books
(
id int not null auto_increment,
author_id int not null,
title varchar(255)
price decimal(10,2),
constraint fk_books_author foreign key (author_id) references authors(id),
primary_key (id)
);
The table definition above generates this error
Oct 10 — 3
This is driving me bonkers:
I've tried Googling but I get incosistent answers about what to do, and the error message here is nearly useless. Any suggestions?
And yes, I already ran this script. In fact, the problems started after doing so. I already have gcc 4.0 selected.
UPDATE: Okay, I got it working. Actually, there are a few different problems, and you have to do some running around
scott$ sudo gem install mysql
Attempting local installation of 'mysql'
Local gem file not found: mysql*.gem
Attempting remote installation of 'mysql'
ERROR: While executing gem ... (NoMethodError)
undefined method `cert_chain=' for #
I've tried Googling but I get incosistent answers about what to do, and the error message here is nearly useless. Any suggestions?
And yes, I already ran this script. In fact, the problems started after doing so. I already have gcc 4.0 selected.
UPDATE: Okay, I got it working. Actually, there are a few different problems, and you have to do some running around
Oct 10 — 0
I'm reading the "Agile Web Development with Rails" book, and there's one quote I really enjoy:
Amen, brother.
A use case is simply a statement about how some entity uses a system. Consultants invent these kinds of phrases when they want to charge more money -- it's a perversion of business life that fancy words always cost more than plain ones, even though the plain ones are more valuable.
Amen, brother.
Oct 04 — 4
Even more on simplifying code with generic programming! NSArray's -valueForKey: has a feature that may not be immediately obvious. You can use it to return an array of values buried within a tree of objects. Here's a working example
Oct 04 — 4
This is a simple little tip, but it's worth knowing that NSString and NSURL can be used together to quickly grab the contents of a web page or RSS feed. It's as simple as this
Oct 04 — 5
I was just playing around with Ruby and just guessing at how things might work. I was fairly impressed that this just worked
Oct 03 — 5
I've decided against releasing DataCruxWeb for now. I think something this big would generate a lot of email and I'd need to donate a ton of time to help people figure things out. I'm also not sure I want to add to the noise by releasing another persistence engine. I've been taking a closer look at Rails, and it does a lot of stuff right
Oct 03 — 11
Key-Value Coding (KVC) is a Cocoa protocol for getting and setting values generically. In programming, the term "generically" describes a way of doing things that applies to many different situations.
Generic code can reduce to total amount of code in a project (which is always good) and helps software to handle situations that the programmer didn't anticipate. Generic, reusable code is emphasized throughout Cocoa. For example
Generic code can reduce to total amount of code in a project (which is always good) and helps software to handle situations that the programmer didn't anticipate. Generic, reusable code is emphasized throughout Cocoa. For example
Oct 03 — 2
I've been thinking about doing simple one-off posts on various Cocoa topics for a while now, and I've decided to actually start. I'm planning to cover a variety of topics in short, high-level posts. Some topics will cover extreme fundamentals, others will be a bit more advanced. The first one will be key-value coding.
Sep 30 — 1
Amazing how things get twisted around as they're published. Here's Apple quote on the nano screens:
Here's a quote from another site:
Hmmm.
Our figures show this issue has affected less than 1/10 of 1 per cent of the total iPod nano units that we've shipped
Here's a quote from another site:
Apple say its a manufacturing fault that only affects one in ten of the iPods.
Hmmm.
Sep 20 — 2
I was looking at a movie site and found this description for Lord of War:
I must attempt to contain my enthusiasm.
An arm dealer tries to change his ways and finds many complications along the way.
I must attempt to contain my enthusiasm.
Sep 14 — 0
On the off chance this might help somebody, here's a solution for a problem with Qmail + PHP + FreeBSD. The issue was essentially that Qmail functioned perfectly in every capacity, except that PHP's mail() function was not able to deliver mail to remote servers
Sep 09 — 2
So the Motorola ROKR phone. This the most decidely non-Apple device I've ever seen. Is this supposed to appeal to iPod owners? Is this thing as big as it looks? Now, more than ever, I want an iPhone.
Sep 09 — 5
I got a chance to briefly play with an iPod nano tonight. Very cool, the value is immediately obvious when you pick it up. I'd easily choose this over the previous mini model. Nice screen, feels good in the hands. Even more strikingly small than the Shuffle. Good stuff. Mmalc said all the black ones have sold out at Valley Fair.
Sep 07 — 7
Apple made a subtle adjustment to its product page typography for the iPod nano, which makes the text easier to read. There's a slightly higher line-height value, giving each line a bit more
Follow your bliss.
