I posted a brief thought on RCA on my Sun blog In short, software developers could improve quality and simplify by employing RCA during development. Avoid getting caught up in what’s new and cool and focus on what your intended users really need.
Read More »XCode breakpoint speech synthesis! 0
In mid December I attended iPhone dev camp Colorado, and among many other things, learned about the very cool ability of XCode to speak the value of variables and other items at breakpoints while debugging. XCode uses whatever voice you have configured in OS X to do the synthesis, and spits out not just variable […]
Read More »Rating Software Developers 0
It takes all kinds of people to make any project successful; designers, code monkeys, requirements junkies, architects, and there are no repeatably good mechanisms for evaluating folks to determine if you want them to be a part of your team or not. This sort of rating or measurement is something people from all three perspectives […]
Read More »iPhone development joy 0
Seeing as it’s been a year now since I began coding for iPhone, I felt like rambling a bit on that topic… I got my 1st gen iPhone in September of 2007, and knew within minutes of actually using the thing (rather than just drooling over photos and videos) that iPhone was going to be […]
Read More »soekris embedded linux devices 0
For years I’ve had a number of systems that have been retired to my server closet as they’ve lost favor as my primary desktop, only to be reborn as a server of this, that, or, something else… Unfortunately, these systems are power hogs and are getting old enough that replacement parts are available only from […]
Read More »JavaFX 0
another day, another scripting language… I’ll reserve in depth comment until I’ve had time to thoroughly explore JavaFX, but the choices facing today’s software folks are staggering to be certain. Personally, I’m finding it harder and harder to keep anything in my own memory, syntactic details and the like. More often than not these days, […]
Read More »Unified Storage Simulator and the 7000 series NAS appliances 0
Have a NAS ? Have a NAS that can tell you graphically which client(s) are hogging the NAS while pushing/pulling which file(s) ? yeah… I didn’t think so. November 10, 2008: Sun announced the 7000 series storage products, which combine some very useful administrative features with the power of Solaris and ZFS. I’ve had the […]
Read More »gRApple updated to reflect new Apple refurbished store layout 0
Apple updated their refurbished Mac store and in the process broke gRApple. So, I updated gRApple to reflect the Apple site changes, it’s available here Apple actually improved the parse-ability of the refurb store this time around so the changes were pretty simple and involved removing some older extra bits in the code as well […]
Read More »mmmmmmm, ZFS. 0
First, the background info… We have a family wide NAS which houses hundreds of movies, tens of thousands of songs, hundreds of documents and all manner of other important digital content like vacation photos. Recently, I was listening to some old music (~5yrs) and noticed some degradation (very audible pops and clicks), which is unacceptable. […]
Read More »Android SDK 0
I’ve been developing for iPhone in my spare time for ~8 months now (jailbreak and toolchain prior to the official SDK). For the sake of trying out the competition I snagged the Android SDK and associated plugins and whatnots for Eclipse, and proceeded to implement a simple app. My 2c is that Apple wins on […]
Read More »Chandler 1.0 0
Most folks may not be familiar with the Chandler project, but it has some interesting goals. The project finally hit 1.0 recently, and reached a point that it’s stable enough for serious usage, IMO. I’ve used at various points in the past, and I must say that they’ve done a great job. I’ve been using […]
Read More »jpeekaboo v1 released 0
Alrighty, I finally put the finishing touches on jpeekaboo tonight, enough for others to try it anyhow. v1 is out, and is essentially at the same place as where I had my Stickies fork, only without all the extra unused stuff, and in java! native distros for linux, OS X and Windows are available from […]
Read More »jpeekaboo, java based auto hide drawer note 0
pwsidenote is becoming far more painful than I’d hoped to strip down and end up with what I want. In response, I’m shelving it as is and starting a new project, jpeekaboo. Same goal, auto hide drawer note that can be pinned to any screen edge and sync content offsite. I also need an app […]
Read More »pwsidenote, an auto hide drawer style sticky note application 0
I’m always on the lookout for small apps that help me improve my efficiency. Despite many wanderings into the land of GTD apps, I always come back to a simple plain text scheme, using either post-it like applications, or a simple text editor. On the OS X platform, I use sidenote. On Windows, I use […]
Read More »Book: Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering 0
I recently finished reading this book. See the books page for more details. In short, it has some interesting information and is certainly worth a read.
Read More »Centralized vs. Decentralized Storage 0
A number of times thus far in my career, common storage has been a sizable bottleneck in the application frameworks in which I’ve worked. Centralized solutions are slow and easier to manage. Decentralized ones are relatively rare, complex, and less than ideal. One decent solution is DRBD, which when combined with OCFS2 or GFS can […]
Read More »Hotkey consoles for all 0
I still really like the hotkey triggered drop down console notion. I’ve been a fan ever since finding Visor for OS X. Today, I was wondering if I’d have to come up with my own solution for Windows when I came across an existing way provided by someone else. Granted, it isn’t as friendly as […]
Read More »Forward, the quick iPhone call forwarding toggle 0
I decided to whip up a little iPhone application to help with an issue I have with the existing call forwarding feature. You have to go into settings, then phone, then call forwarding, all to enable/disable forwarding. I wanted something quicker. A toggle that turns it on/off each time you run it. The result is […]
Read More »Apple TV vs. Mac Mini as HTPC 0
Recently, I was running an Apple TV as a HTPC, hooked up to our TV, to watch movies from our file server (mounted via NFS) here at home. The back row interface of Apple TV was slick, but sadly the h.264 encoded movies were too much for the Apple TV’s processing power, and it regularly […]
Read More »iPhone Rocks! 1
After the recent price drop of the iPhone I decided to pick one up from the Apple refurb store. I snagged a 4GB model for $249 + shipping/tax/etc… and coupled with 3rd party software on the intertron threw my existing cingular/at&t sim card into this bad boy to avoid the lengthy contract and high use […]
Read More »Visor (OS X) and Tilda (Linux) 0
I’ve been using visor on OS X for a while now, and decided to add it and a linux analog to the SoftwareGoodies page. They are both a drop down console application that allow you to press some key sequence to “activate” a terminal. I’ve found that since I typically have multiple virtual desktops in […]
Read More »Added FreeMind to SoftwareGoodies 0
Mind maps rock. I’ve found them abundantly useful for thinking through problems, and for mapping out tasks to help plan a project. FreeMind is a Java based mind mapping app which is very useful. There’s a link on the SoftwareGoodies page.
Read More »Added Smart & Gets Things Done to book page 0
I recently read Joel Spolsky’s short book which serves as a useful ‘guide to finding the best technical talent’. It’s the first book of the past three I’ve read which warrants a mention and a post on the books page.
Read More »nifty little Ruby application: gRApple, added to itch+scratch ware page 0
Recently, I’ve been keeping a close eye on the refurbished apple store page for Macs. They have a number of machines, laptop and desktop alike, that go for great prices from time to time. Many of the prices are ~15% less than retail, but occasionally, they approach 30% off! There are two issues though: 1) […]
Read More »Added The Black Swan to books page 0
Yes, I’ve been reading more lately. Go to the books page to see my quick review/summary, and pick up a copy from Amazon.com.
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