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 …

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.

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 …

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.