Sat, Sep 20, 2014
There’s a new crop of programmer’s text editors out there written with JavaScript and Web browser technology, and they’ve been getting a lot of buzz. I’ve been playing around a bit with several of them, and I’m intrigued by Zed. Zed steps a bit outside the traditional box and tries to bring a simplified approach to code editing with minimalist UI and reduced command complexity. It also features an excellent remote editing mode, and it feels like it takes cross-platform compatibility more to heart than some of the other options.
Wed, Oct 2, 2013
The application icon for Textmate 2 is a bright, pink flower. Maybe they just want to avoid confusion with the commercial version during the alpha phase, but it does look a little unprofessional next to the other icons in dock. Fortunately, it’s an easy fix. Here’s how to do it:
Download and extract the 1.5 version of TextMate. Ctrl-Click the application and select Show Package Contents. Browse to the Contents > Resources folder and copy the TextMate.
Tue, Oct 1, 2013
How did I manage to miss this for so long? TextMate, the Mac text editor that set the standard by which all modern programmer’s editors are judged, is now Open Source. TextMate 2.0 is still in alpha status, but the first alpha build was released over 21 months ago, so it’s probably pretty stable by now.
You can download the binary, or access the source on GitHub. The latest builds require at least OS X 10.
Sat, May 18, 2013
Over time, you’ll probably find duplicate entries cropping up in your Mac’s “Open With” menu. They often result from applying application updates. Here’s how to fix the “Open With” menu and get rid of all those dupes.
Sun, May 5, 2013
Here’s a brief how-to for installing Scala on a Mac. It’s super-simple if you’re already running Homebrew. If you’re not running it already then this article will show you how to do that too.
Mon, Jul 11, 2011
At first glance, Google+ seems promising. I like how the Circles feature gives you more control over who you share with. The desktop browser interface looks nice and works well, but the mobile experience on the iPhone leaves something to be desired. Several features are unavailable including photo uploading and profile editing, and viewing someone else’s profile still redirects to Google Buzz. The iPad just displays a larger version of the iPhone interface that doesn’t take any advantage of the increased screen size.
Tue, Sep 15, 2009
Google recently increased the size of the search box on the home page and search results. Am I the only one that thinks it looks clunky and amateurish?
Fri, Jan 23, 2009
I recently went through the unfortunate demise of the primary disk on my main development machine, so I had to rebuild my dev environment from scratch. I have a test server running SQL Server 2005, so I decided to install SQL Server 2008 on my dev machine for compatibility testing. Imagine my frustration when I tried to load up my database project in Visual Studio 2008 and was told that I needed a local instance of SQL Server 2005!
Thu, Oct 16, 2008
When creating a new Windows Communication Foundation web service, the default extension is .svc. This can be a problem if you want to migrate an existing .NET web service where clients may have hard-coded the .asmx extension. The following article from MSDN Blogs shows how to configure a WCF web service that uses the .asmx extension:
Wenlong Dong’s Blog : How to use .asmx extension to handle WCF requests?
Wed, Oct 15, 2008
Via Ajaxian: Google is now hosting a number of open-source AJAX libraries, so you can take advantage of the vast Google infrastructure to reduce the load on your server. Complete details on how to access the script files can be found in the AJAX Libraries API Developer’s Guide.
Fri, Jun 13, 2008
It looks like this blog was recently hacked with a rather nasty, malware-distributing trojan, and apparently this has been a rather wide-spread problem. Hopefully there weren’t too many visitors turned away by the “Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer!” message from Google. Here is a blog article with more information about the problem. I deleted all of the WordPress files and upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1, then reloaded all of the ScribbishWP theme files from a backup.
Tue, May 27, 2008
Some of the standard ASP.NET server controls allow the user to specify a template containing custom markup that will be used inside the server control. It is possible to create “.ascx” user controls that make use of this type of template. The MSDN documentation explains how.
Sat, May 17, 2008
When discussing the new features in Visual Studio 2008, LINQ gets most of the press. However, LINQ only works if you are targeting the .NET 3.5 Framework. Another new feature of Visual Studio 2008 is the ability to choose which Framework version to target, and sometimes you just don’t have the luxury of upgrading all your users to the latest Framework. Fortunately several of the new language features in C# 3.
Wed, May 7, 2008
Clearly blog posts have been very sparse here, so I’m going to try something new. Whenever I find a good article or web site that helps me solve a particular problem I’m having, I’ll try to dash off a quick post referencing it. This’ll help me locate the information if I need it again later, and maybe it will help someone else find what they’re looking for too.
Have you ever noticed those strange “WebResource.
Tue, Oct 23, 2007
I recently purchased a U3-enabled flash drive. I’ve been using Password Safe (originally from Bruce Schneier’s Counterpane Labs, now a SourceForge project) for some time now to store my passwords, and it seemed like a perfect application to have on a flash drive. I was shocked when I discovered that they wanted $9.95 for the U3 version of a free utility!
Well, the U3 Developer Kit is available for a free registration and Password Safe is Open Source, so I decided to see if I could build my own U3 version.
Sat, Sep 22, 2007
We’re finally back after some extended downtime. Obviously I don’t get around to updating the site very often, so I’m sure it comes as no surprise that I didn’t notice the problem right away. A big thanks to Jeffrey who emailed to inform me that ScribbishWP was unavailable. All of the static content on the site was accessible, but all of the WordPress-powered pages were down. It took technical support a week to track down and fix the problem, but as of last night everything seems to be working again.
Wed, Nov 29, 2006
I finally upgraded the blog to run on WordPress 2.0. I’ve been holding off on this for awhile because I just haven’t had the time to deal with it. I’m happy to report, though, that the upgrade went just as smoothly as the WordPress documentation claims.
After backing up the database and files from the previous blog installation, I downloaded the ZIP file for WordPress 2.0.5, extracted the files to my local disk, and uploaded them to my host server with FileZilla.
Fri, Oct 20, 2006
After a lengthy beta cycle, Internet Explorer 7 has finally been released. Microsoft claims that IE7 has significantly better CSS compatibility than previous releases, so how does that impact the sidebar “bug” in ScribbishWP? You’ll be happy to know that IE7 does in fact fix the overflow problem that caused the sidebar to shift to the bottom of the page. Unfortunately, IE7 still puts the scrollbars inside the existing content space, but it’s a whole lot better than having to play games with specific elements in your content to prevent IE from barfing.
Tue, Aug 8, 2006
From eWeek, the free development tools market is about to get bigger as Borland resurrects the Turbo brand. In addition to Turbo C++, the lineup includes Turbo Delphi for Win32, Turbo Delphi for .NET, and Turbo C#. Each Turbo product will be available in a free Explorer version and a more advanced Professional version. More details are available at www.turboexplorer.com.
Tue, Jul 18, 2006
Some ScribbishWP users have reported problems with the sidebar in Internet Explorer. When the site is viewed in other browsers such as Firefox or Safari everything looks fine, but in IE the sidebar disappears to the bottom of the page below the content. The problem doesn’t occur on all ScribbishWP sites, so what causes the problem and what can you do about it?
The Problem Surprise, surprise! The problem is actually a bug in the way Internet Explorer implements CSS.
Thu, Jun 15, 2006
UPDATE: ScribbishWP is now hosted on GitHub at kpitt/scribbishwp. You can find the original archive files there, or you can fork it and create your own version.
Those who have visited this blog before will probably notice a change in appearance. I never cared much for the default WordPress theme, but I browsed through who knows how many alternate themes in the theme gallery and still didn’t find anything to my liking.
Sun, Apr 16, 2006
This past week, Google released the new Google Calendar service. I’ve really become a big fan of Gmail, and it looks like this may be another service that I’ll be getting a bit of use out of.
My wife has been trying to get me to keep better track of our various family events and appointments, but I find the process a bit cumbersome. She puts together a calendar on paper, which I then have to take to work and transcribe into my Outlook calendar.
Wed, Apr 12, 2006
Ruby on Rails is a hot topic in the Web development community right now. I’ve always enjoyed learning interesting new languages and environments because I think it makes you a better programmer even if you never use them in a production application. Apple Developer Connection recently posted an article by Mike Clark entitled Using Ruby on Rails for Web Development on Mac OS X. I followed the instructions referenced in the article and had no problem getting the latest versions of Ruby, Rails, and MySQL running on the Mac Mini.
Wed, Jan 25, 2006
The Opera browser is now totally free. Opera started out as one of the few commercial competitors to Microsoft and Netscape’s free browsers. They later came out with an ad-supported version that you could use for free if you didn’t want to pay extra to get rid of the ads, and now they have finally eliminated the ads and made it entirely free.
This has apparently been out there for a while, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten much hype.
Fri, Dec 16, 2005
I’ve been using del.icio.us for a while now, not so much for the “social networking” aspects of it but because it’s a great way to keep track of all the useful and interesting stuff I find scattered around the Web. Not too long ago, Yahoo! debuted a similar service as part of its My Web 2.0 Beta. I gave it a try and found that it had a nice UI and a few enhancements like the ability to limit who can see your links, but also a few drawbacks (in particular, no option to rename an existing tag).
Mon, Dec 5, 2005
Via Scott Hanselman, you can now display a web page with Internet Explorer directly inside a Firefox tab. The extension is called IE Tab, and it provides similar functionality to the older IE View except that it embeds Internet Explorer inside Firefox instead of opening a separate IE window. Once installed, you can right-click a page in Firefox and switch to IE mode without switching tabs. You can also right-click a link and open the link in a new IE tab.
Sat, Sep 17, 2005
OK, so Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 are scheduled to be released on November 7. There’s a lot of cool stuff there, but we’ve known about that for quite a while and with the beta already in Go Live it hardly qualifies as “new” anymore. There’s Windows Vista which includes some cool enhancements to the end-user experience and provides opportunities for developing some new types of OS add-ons, but it doesn’t seem like a huge win for general development.
Tue, Sep 13, 2005
The company I work for, SPI Dynamics, is a Microsoft VSIP partner. The Visual Studio Integration team from Microsoft held a special partner-only tailgate party last night at Dodger Stadium with tickets to the Los Angeles Dodgers vs. Colorado Rockies game. I’m not a sports fanatic, and being from Atlanta I’m definately not a Dodgers fan (Go Braves!), but sitting in the second row of the field level just inside the right field foul pole was a pretty cool experience even for a geek.
Fri, Sep 9, 2005
Next week I’m heading out to Los Angeles for the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference. I’m sure I’ll learn about a lot of cool new technologies that I won’t be able to take advantage of yet, but hopefully I’ll at least be able to find some time when I get back to blog about a few of them.
Thu, Sep 1, 2005
Philipp Lenssen posted some tips for Google Talk. Be sure to read the comments, too, for additional tips discovered by readers.
My favorite tip is adding emphasis in messages using the *bold* and _italic_ convention that has been commonly used in plain-text e-mail and Usenet posts for years. I’ve never been one to use a lot of formatting in IM’s, so this is perfect for me. Simple, clean, gets the job done.
Thu, Sep 1, 2005
I’m a little behind the times in blogging about this, but I needed to actually have a blog first. Rumors have been flying for a while that Google was planning to release its own IM service, and now Google Talk is here. It is based on the Jabber XMPP protocol, but it isn’t yet linked into the Jabber server network.
You won’t find any fancy features in the minimalist client program, but that can sometimes be a good thing as it seems to use far fewer system resources than most other clients.
Thu, Sep 1, 2005
My name is Kenny Pitt. Very few people have ever heard of me, and I don’t expect that to change just because I started a blog. I’ll probably lose interest in this after a month or two and stop posting, but who knows?
I created this blog for all the geeky, technical stuff that nobody over on my family blog is going to want to read. It’s a place for me to capture links to cool applications, useful technical info, occasional thoughts about programming, and maybe even a code snippet or two.