Coding on Holyarmy.org

Odd Git Licensing Message on OSX

Wed, 18 Sep 2013 23:28:52 +0000

Today,IOS 7 dropped to the general public. As usually comes with the release, there was an Xcode update. I updated.

For some time, I’ve been using the git bundled in Xcode as it makes it simpler to get updates as they come with Xcode. Today, that yielded an amusing message.

I use git via an alias in my .bashrc

alias git='xcrun git'

A simple version check reveals all:

git –version

Oops… git is apparently subject to Apple’s licenses.

Have fun RESTing!

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 10:46:59 +0000

Cheesy post titles aside…

I just discovered the very simple but incredibly useful RESTClient at: http://code.google.com/p/rest-client/ .

It’s a simple Java GUI app for testing out one’s REST services. You can choose your: URL, HTTP method, add any custom headers, add a body for PUT/POST, set auth info, SSL info, and do simple scripting.

This is an incredibly useful tool, AND a far cry better than doing it all on the command line with curl.

Here, File File! Nears Release, Gets Attention

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 22:51:08 +0000

I’m taking time away from adding spit and polish to the exciting Here, File File project to say WOO HOO!

The whole team (Adam, Buck, and I) are psyched! A few days ago we found out Here, File File is a finalist in the AppsFire Apps Star Awards. And today, The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) published a great HFF write up.

If you haven’t seen our promo video yet, give it a whirl!

Updating RubyGems on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 04:38:40 +0000

I’m just posting a simple tip today.

I was wanting to play around with the very cool SASS meta-language using Compass. The language and tool are implemented in Ruby, which is pre-installed on OS X, but as I discovered, I needed a newer version of RubyGems.

I had already known I needed to update Gems, so I was doing the following:

$ sudo gem update

Eventually I got errors like this:

Updating installed gems...
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.github.com/
Attempting remote update of RedCloth
ERROR:  Error installing RedCloth:
    RedCloth requires RubyGems version >= 1.2
Attempting remote update of capistrano
ERROR:  Error installing capistrano:
    capistrano requires RubyGems version >= 1.2
Attempting remote update of net-sftp
ERROR:  Error installing net-sftp:
    net-sftp requires RubyGems version >= 1.2
Attempting remote update of net-ssh
ERROR:  Error installing net-ssh:
    net-ssh requires RubyGems version >= 1.2
Gems updated: RedCloth, capistrano, net-sftp, net-ssh

Turns out, to update RubyGems, one must update the gem system!

Logins with mod_rewrite, Cookies, and Javascript Redux

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 06:44:45 +0000

A while back I posted a simple solution for restricting website access in a situation where HTTP basic authentication couldn’t be used.

Not much more to the story, but I did make a few tweaks to my sample code. The mod_rewrite rule and javascript have been a tiny bit improved, so now after a successful login, it will try to redirect you to where you intended to go. (Previously, it always sent the user to /)

WordPressMU Plugin Commander

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 07:56:01 +0000

I’m solidly impressed with the WPMU Plugin Commander. One thing that seemed odd to me about WPMU was that I either enable users to have plugin control, or NO ONE (not even the site admin) has the ability to enabled/disable plugins (without a lot of hacking).

This plugin provides a control panel where I can globally enable/disable plugins, set plugins to be auto-enabled for new blogs, and give users the ability to enable/disable only selected plugins.

WordPress Regenerate Thumbnail Plugin

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 06:57:50 +0000

I was literally sitting down to write a plugin that did this, when I stumbled across Viper007’s Regenerate Thumbnail plugin.

I could still write my own version, but eh, what’s the point. 🙂 Seems to work great!

Use vi key bindings in bash

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 06:29:38 +0000

A long time ago I used ksh with vi key bindings, and life was good.

Then I moved on to bash, but for some reason, I never investigated using vi key bindings. I simply lived with the defaults (which, for the record, are emacs-like key bindings).

So, just the other day I said to myself, “Self, I want to use vi key bindings in bash. I want to again experience the joy of traversing and editing my command line in COMMAND MODE. I want the speed and the power of my precious vi (well, I use vim) at my finger tips. And I NO LONGER want to waste time holding arrow keys or to think about using emacs-like commands.”

A Project Idea: iPhoto to WordPress [gallery] Export

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 05:52:02 +0000

I’ve been spending some time getting my son’s blog setup. In doing so, I discovered that as of WordPress 2.5, there is built-in [ gallery ] functionality. Though it isn’t full featured, it’s pretty nice, and perfectly integrated with WordPress, since, well, it IS WordPress.

Currently the process to put photos into a gallery is:

Choose photos in iPhoto
Export chosen files to disk
Create new WordPress post
Add media via WordPress uploader

This isn’t too bad, especially for a geek who’s used to lots of arcane workarounds to accomplish simple goals. But… for my wife or others who don’t want the hassle, this is basically annoying.

Good Post on Using Ant for Solid Build Process

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 20:35:30 +0000

I use Ant for my Java projects. It’s a great and powerfule build too. However, there’s always more than can be done to improve the quality of the build process.

I found this nice article that gives some good examples of a complete build process with Ant: dev, test, prod, etc.

Investigating OpenID

Tue, 27 May 2008 15:02:43 +0000

Aaron (one of my co-workers), recently posted a link about OpenID. I’ve given OpenID only cursory glances over the last year, but the Coding Horror link in Aaron’s post had a comment to this Google Video where Simon Willison gives a Google Tech Talk on The Implications of OpenID. The video is nearly a year old, but to date, it’s done more to convince me to get on the OpenID bandwagon than anything else.

Logins with mod_rewrite + Cookies + JavaScript

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 03:05:32 +0000

I recently had an odd situation come up, though it’s not incredibly hard to imagine. I needed to create a staging web server, identical to production, but it should live on a different hostname (eg, staging.sherman.bz, instead of www.sherman.bz). The content should not accessible to the public, nor to search engines. This isn’t really so much a privacy or security issue as it is a convenience and customer service issue. If search engines somehow picked up on our staging site (and they would, given it’s full of SEO triggering info, google analytics scripts and the like) then our search information could become poisoned with the staging URL. Also bad would be if a customer found the staging site and posted information to the wrong place. I’ve actually seen both of these happen in the past when measures were not in place to prevent it.

Fixing Binary File Corruption from Ant Copies

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 02:44:09 +0000

So there I was, poking around in some java / j2ee code, trying to learn how it all works. I did some testing on a Linux server and realized, something is broken. It seemed something was corrupting ALL the Jar files in WEB-INF/lib/.

A co-worker guessed that the token filtering Ant was doing might be the culprit. He was right. It seems Ant has issues with detecting whether files are binary or not, given that it uses a Reader class which runs the files through a character decoder. This is specifically a problem on Unix systems since they commonly use UTF8 character set, and in that case Ant hasn’t a clue if its looking at UTF8 text or binary data.