Archive for the 'Development' Category

MacPorts tips

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

I use MacPorts as a package manager for Mac OS X and used it mindlessly for a long time before learning some basic commands that helped out.

First, to update your MacPorts version to the newest release you can do:

% sudo port selfupdate

That’s really basic and well-documented. To upgrade all your installed packages do:

% sudo [...]

From SmugMug to Flickr

Saturday, July 4th, 2009

I recently migrated all my photos from SmugMug to Flickr. A long time ago I wrote a blog post discussing why I originally chose SmugMug. I was so dedicated to SmugMug that I wrote an iPhoto plugin to upload photos from iPhoto to SmugMug. I still like SmugMug because the guys who [...]

Innovation Through Simplification

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

I met Tim Bray today! He’s a really nice guy and offered lots of great insight about a variety of topics.

One interesting thing that he mentioned was how innovative technologies can be derived by simplifying existing technologies. This was the case in the derivation of XML from SGML. SGML predates the rise of [...]

PyXML on Leopard

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

I attempted to install PyXML on Mac OS X 10.5 today and ran into a problem: I was unable to load any of the PyXML modules:

>>> from xml import xpath Traceback (most recent call last): File “”, line 1, in ImportError: cannot import name xpath`

So, the problem originates from this nasty hack that allows PyXML [...]

SmugMugExport 1.0.3

Tuesday, October 9th, 2007

I’ve released SmugMugExport 1.0.3. Notable changes include:

new subcategory selection in the album creation interface use of PUT instead of multi-part POST for uploading images new keyboard shortcuts for adding and removing albums (try ‘-’, ‘+’, or Delete) other bug fixes, internal cleanup, etc

To those unfamiliar with the project, SmugMugExport is an iPhoto export plugin that allows you [...]

Where’s NSRegularExpression?

Saturday, September 15th, 2007

I wrote CocoaICU about a year ago when I made the following observations:

ICU has great regular expression support ICU is installed on Mac OS X Foundation lacks support for regexes.

CocoaICU is simply a light layer of Objective-C code that encapsulates ICU.

It’s remarkable that Cocoa still lacks regular expression support. I am not a Leopard user or [...]

The Art of Resume Writing for Software Developers

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

There is no shortage of advice available to guide you in writing a resume. I’m going to pollute those waters a bit more and lend my advice which is targeted at software developers.

It’s fairly easy for an intelligent person with a bit of work experience to write a mediocre resume: insert contact info, insert previous [...]

Announcing SmugMugExport: the SmugMug iPhoto Plugin

Saturday, June 2nd, 2007

I’d like to annouce the availability of SmugMugExport, a SmugMug iPhoto plugin. SmugMugExport is free, open-source software that is distributed under the BSD license.

The goal of SmugMugExport is to provide a simple interface for uploading files to SmugMug. The goal of the plugin is not to provide a complete interface to all of [...]

Joel on Software (the book)

Sunday, April 15th, 2007

I’m reading Joel’s book Joel on Software. The book is fun to read and I agree with most of what Joel has to say. A lot of the content is five years old but most of it doesn’t sound dated.

Joel has some annoying tendencies as a writer that bothered me. The most [...]

iTunes2web 1.1

Wednesday, January 17th, 2007

iTunes2web 1.1 has been released. It should now run properly on Intel Macs.