Introducing pre-commit hooks I recently became aware of the open-source project: pre-commit, which is "A framework for managing and maintaining multi-language pre-commit hooks." The key feature of pre-commit is that it creates an execution environment for itself in order to enable running hooks without messing with (or creating conflicts with …

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 …

There's been a lot of discussion about the 2019 Mac Pro and various assertions that it's over-designed, overpriced, or underpowered. Since I decided to replace my venerable 2013 Mac Pro1 with a 2019 Mac Pro, I figured I'd write up my experience with the device as a developer. The …

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 …

OK, now that I have your attention with the catchy title, let me get right into the reason behind this post. Rob has been doing a lot of work lately on a set of roles to provision raspberry pi systems. I'm grateful for the work in this area, because frankly …

At ClueTrust, we use a lot of automation to run our systems. It's mostly how just a couple of us can manage hundreds of virtual servers and keep them up-to-date and operational. A few years back, I moved from using Puppet to Ansible, mostly at the suggestion of RS, who …

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 …

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 …

Matt Gemmell penned a great piece on User Interface design and evolution as it relates to, well, a lot of things. It's definitely worth the time to read Tail Wagging.

So with all the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth over Adobe Flash in the last few days, I just wanted to make sure I got this little tidbit in. When it comes to user experience, Adobe just doesn't understand. Their "platform" of flash brings a mediocrity born of …

Well, Apple made for a lively Thursday this week by announcing the software roadmap (although not the hardware roadmap) for the iPhone. There was a lot to take in, and it took forever to download the SDK (ok, in reality, it took only a few hours, but Apple clearly wasn't …

Maybe not applicable to everyone, but for those with network monitoring needs, the folks in Australia at Lithium Corp. are showing a nice commercial client-server network monitoring system. What's the big deal? There are a ton of these and most of them are free? Well, this one has an XML-based …

I understand if everybody takes this with a grain of salt given my particular predilection for Macintosh computers and OS X in particular, but there's been a lot of talk lately about the "increasing number" of found "security holes" on the OS X operating system. Unfortunately, the folks who find …

Last evening, Apple released the first security update for 2006 (Security Update 2006-001 for Intel and PPC). Detailed information is online in About Security Update 2006-001. More details follow here, but the summary is that they have addressed a wide variety of problems, including just about every facet of the …

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 …

Not that I expect that the folks at Macworld magazine are technical rocket scientists, but this latest piece of "lab" work has me puzzled as to what they're trying to prove and who they're working for. In a series of "tests" performed on the iMac Core Duo and the iMac …

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 …

The XCode 2.1 developer tools is a very large package (pushing well over .5GB), and now you have one CD and want to install it on a fleet of machines. Note: this can help with installing almost anything... I was just about to use one of my favorite tools …

For those geeks out there who sometimes have to program things other than Macintoshes, here's an article that describes using Apple's XCode on OS X to develop code that runs on embedded systems.