weblog.masukomi.org

There are a ton of good OS X apps out there. These are the ones that I really appreciate, and think you ought to check out too.

Please note that this was written on Feb. 2nd 2012, and that software changes at a very rapid pace.

Writing Apps

Scrivener

If you’re serious about writing, or writing anything significant (book, screenplay, thesis, research paper, etc.), there is only one app to consider, and Scrivener is it. Be sure to go through the tutorial though. Its features do a spectacular job of getting out of your way, which means that a lot of great functionality is hiding in plain sight. The tutorial shows you just how incredible this app is. Also, it’ll generate ePub and Kindle formats for you, and it lets you write in Markdown,* if you want.*

The Problem

Most people only track their time when they are billing by the hour, and most people aren’t billing by the hour. As a result, most people don’t track their time.

Now, you can try to bootstrap a new business or product without time tracking, but you’re doing yourself a great disservice if you do. The problem is that we always think we can get more done than we really have time for, and we inevitably think we’ll have more time to work on things than we really do. Add to this the fact that humans are incredibly bad about judging and estimating time, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that our after-hours projects will take longer than we thought.

You can tell weather or not someone really “gets” unit testing by asking them one simple question, “Do you use mock objects?” Almost invariably, they will say “no”. Even people who have totally gotten the testing religion. It’s like watching someone pray to a statue of Jesus; totally oblivious to the fact that Jesus himself is standing four feet away reading a book.

This is partially due to the fact that most geeks don’t actually know what a unit test is. They think that testing the methods of a specific class constitutes a unit test, but that’s only part of the story. A unit test test is when you test the methods of a specific class in isolation, and the difference is critical. You know how some people call us “computer scientists”. Yeah, well this is the science part.

I interview a fair number of geeks every year and usually spend my alotted time going over one programming challenge. Lately I’ve been looking for a new one that was simple, but still big enough to give me a glimpse into their thinking. I think I’ve found it.

Why I Like This

I really like this question because:

• A good solution involves recursion but you could approach it in multiple ways.
• The seemingly simple Array throws a monkey-wrench into the whole thing.
• It tests their ability to follow written instructions.
• It should give an idea of how willing they are to ask questions.
• It’s small, but with 3 separate, but connected, things to handle should be enough to give insight into how they work through things.
• In my experience you’ll spend ~40 minutes on this regardless of experience level. I’ve only had one person do it in 5. If folks finish a little early I try and find out what kind of job would make them happy.

The Question

You’re presented with the following YAML file which you need to convert to a useful data structure, but for whatever reason you don’t have a YAML library. You do however, have something that has converted it into a tree of nodes.

There are two good reasons to serve Octopress from a self-hosted git repo.

1. It provides you with an off-site backup in case your local copies go up in flames.
2. It gives you an environment where you can integrate secondary scripts and libraries that allow you to do things like e-mail posts to Octopress.
3. git provides a very efficient, and atomic, means of uploading your files.

Complicating factors:

1. Not all ISPs have ssh access or the latest version of ruby, and may not have git or Bundlr installed.
2. Because of the above you may not be able to regenerate html files from markdown on the server.
3. You need to have a basic familiarity with navigating directories and editing files over ssh.

These instructions are not for people uncomfortable with using the command line in a *nix environment. Of course, if you were uncomfortable with that you probably wouldn’t be using Octopress in the first place.

This is a simple idea for every web development company (small or large) that owes its existence to open source software. I’m going to use Ruby on Rails as an example, but this is just as applicable to all of the other frameworks and tools we use daily.

On the first Wednesday of every month all of your developers work on bugs or needed features in one of the frameworks or tools that your company can’t live without.

Where you spend your time developing is an important decision for an open source developer. Partly we do it for personal satisfaction, partly we do it to give us a tool we want, but there’s always a part of us that wants others to use and enjoy our work. I want to talk about that, and I want to talk about the frustrations that people who use those open source projects have, but first I need to set the stage. Paul Ruoget (@paulrouget) has been working on a cool live CSS editor for Firefox which should be out in FF 11.

At our house, you go to the bathroom armed, or you don’t go at all. At least, once the sun goes down. There’s a pistol wedged between couch cushions with handle raised for easy access as we watch TV. You think I’m joking, that maybe the gun is metaphorical, or that this is the start of some fictional story. It’s not. Every word is true.

It all started a month or two ago. We’d hear them moving around. Little sounds. Things you could write off and not really worry about: “Probably just a mouse…” But each night the sounds got louder. The little scratches escalated until they were thumpings on the wall. And then the hole opened up, like the gaping maw of hell itself. It would almost be better if it really was an entrance to hell. At least with hell there’d be flames, or something. But this is just blackness, silent and dark. Maybe the Christians have it wrong.

The idea is that it can be very useful to base64 encode an image directly into your css file instead of referencing a separate file, but doing so usually involves dropping to the command line, calling openssl, copy-pasting the output, specifying the mime-type, etc… Bret’s Terpstra distilled all of that into one drag-and-drop command for Textmate.The following is simply a generalization and instructions for using the drag and drop in MacVim / GVim

There are a few problems with Jekyll / Octopress though that would, realistically, make me less inclined to use it. First, you need to have your entire blog checked out on whatever box you’re posting from, and that is simply not something I’m willing to do on a work computer, and not something I necessarily can do when on a borrowed computer. Secondly, the user interface sucks. Well, there really isn’t one.