I put this up in hopes that somebody runs across it more quickly than I did... This weekend, as a "break", I decided to do some work updating an ancient (2003-vintage) piece of code that I wrote when I was doing extensive blogging. I'm not certain it'll ever leave my …

When you're looking to quickly create an appropriate .gitignore file for a new repository, you can save yourself some time, and possibly aggravation, by using gitignore.io. Available as either a website with a very simple interface (and completion), or as a simple API-based service documentation for the API and …

For many years, I was a happy Perforce user. Despite clearly not fitting their precise model, I had a three-user license which allowed me and my bots to appropriately work on my code base. I have a number of pretty complex projects, which often have overlapping code and I took …

A number of years ago, I set out to automate a set of manual tests that we've been using for years to validate functionality and UI in Cartographica. I've been through a lot of technologies over the years, some expensive commercial tools, some open source technologies. I won't go through …

For a number of years, Cartographica has had a lot of tests-on the order of 1500+, but a few of them are quite a bit bigger than they should have been, owing mostly to their data-driven nature. This post describes the method used to provide dynamic test creation for Cartographica …

Jenkins For years, I've been using Jenkins as a CI environment at ClueTrust. For those unfamiliar with Jenkins, it's a long-running open-source project built in Java for doing Continuous Integration. It'll work on just about any platform that can run Java (although it's most at home on Unix machines) and …

I have a version of Cartographica that I need to push out before the end of the year, due to a certificate expiration on one of my long-term servers. As a bulwark against problems occurring just at the turn of the year and to make sure that users can use …

This is a note for those of us who might run into this problem. When working on some changes for Cartographica, I ran into some difficulty when using a verb-first command that could take either a list of one type of user-defined object or another type of user-defined object. The …

Wow! Apple certainly wants more people to sign up as Mac developers, that's for sure. In changes made today, the ADC Premier and Select tiers have disappeared and they have been replaced with Mac Developer through the current developer portal (which has the iPhone developer sign-up as well). Mac and …

This is a pretty esoteric topic, but I ran into it and maybe the google will help somebody find my solution before they waste too much time. I have a custom control with a custom IBPlugin which we use in Cartographica. The IBPlugin compiles in all 4 binary modes, but …

IndieHIG is an open source attempt to extend Apple's well-known (and a little long in the tooth) Human Interface Guidelines. So far, not a lot up there, but some good folks are contributing and all the content is available under the MIT license so it is free free.

I'm happy to announce today that LoadMyTracks (ok, make fun of the name if you must, everyone will be making fun of the icon), a program to download GPS data to the Macintosh in GPX or KML (Google Earth) formats is now available from the ClueTrust LoadMyTracks web page. More …

For those out there (you know who you are) who may have some time over the next couple of weeks and are looking to hone Macintosh programming skills, you might take a look at the iron coder contest. It's a timed contest wherein an API is disclosed and the participants …

Well, I guess I'm happy that I didn't upgrade to the 2.16GHz processor and that I ordered early. My order was, until last week, showing Shipment on the 15th, delivery on the 21st. Then Apple announced the upgrade plan and that shipment times would slip by a couple of …

Following up a story from late last week (and a smidgen late in my follow up), Oracle has indeed announced Oracle(r) Database 10g Express Edition (XE). Unfortunately, the details aren't exactly to my liking. The biggest complaint that I see with the product in the initial release is that …

What's new in programming--Cocoa A lot has changed since the last time I seriously sat down to write Macintosh software. At that time, we were still using System 7 (I think...) and the Mac was dominated by the now-deprecated and renamed Carbon API. It was a good programmatic API, but …

You can't get away from cycles, they're everywhere. Today I'm going to focus on what I believe is a great cycle in software development – the return to meaningful software development. When I started programming in (gulp) 1979, the world was unencumbered by GUIs. Most interfaces were text-based unless you were …