Category Archives: Uncategorized

Installing Windows device drivers for absent devices

[This is really one of those "notes to myself that might benefit someone else someday", so please forgive the relative lack of formatting. If you have trouble following this, just leave a comment, and I'll happily expand the post for you and other readers.] I wanted to set up a Windows server to accept login [...]

Embedding Cordova (PhoneGap) in MonoTouch apps

When it comes to writing hybrid mobile apps on iOS today, you usually get to pick between two extremes: 1) primarily use web development technologies and host them in an enhanced WebView (such as PhoneGap), or 2) write a fundamentally native application (CocoaTouch, MonoTouch) and sprinkle in WebViews from time to time and write your [...]

Worst registration form on the internet? DZone.com

Among the sites that I check from time to time for interesting dev-centric links is DZone.com. It skews a little more toward enterprise than do Hacker News or Proggit, and, thus, provides a good way for me to keep my finger on the pulse of popular trends among enterprise developers. They also have managed to [...]

Dreading Apple’s upcoming sandboxing

[Update: Apple gave us a 3 month reprieve. I'm still dreading this, though.] I’m not looking forward to Apple’s impending move to sandbox all apps delivered through the Mac App Store. At the very highest level, I understand the technical motivation for doing it—one of the biggest reasons people don’t download software is that it’s nigh [...]

Python package management

Like most good geeks, there are a few things about which I’m a little bit obsessive-compulsive. The desire to bring order to chaos is probably the same thing that attracted me to software in the first place. One of my strongest compulsions is to want to keep my hard disk squeaky-clean. Don’t get me wrong—I’m [...]

Awesome referer hack

I was talking to Roy Leban the other day about how a particular domain registrar of his makes it check-box trivial to redirect from a naked domain (say example.com) to www.example.com, but doesn’t do anything whatsoever to redirect from example.com/someurl to www.example.com/someurl. I was teasing him about needing to get a real domain registrar, but [...]

A new kind of Browser compatibility pain?

It’s a pain in the butt to ship a web app that works in all of the relevant web browsers today. It seems that crafting stylesheets that works in all of them at once requires as much specialized knowledge today as writing a compiler did a decade ago. As the rate that browser vendors are [...]

Stale blog is stale

Hey, everybody. Been too busy between new kid, move to California, lots of fun work with Cooliris, move back to Seattle, and getting our house cleaned up to make time to get any blogging done. Well, I’m motivated to change that. I’ll have something interesting up by July 1. If not, please hassle me.

Favorite t-shirt series: “the blibbet”

Microsoft is a really old company as tech companies go, and they’re on the third revision of their logo. Much earlier, the logo had a crazy capital-O that was, for some reason, called “the blibbet”. I scored a $7 clearance t-shirt that has the old Microsoft logo on it, complete with blibbet. The 1s and [...]

An antidote to lock-in in the cloud?

I’ve mentioned before that one thing that moderates my natural inclination to go gaga over cloud-based hosting for web applications is that there is, so far, no clean way exists to switch providers. Both Google and Amazon[1] argue that there are theoretical ways to abandon them for a competitor today, but for most business decision [...]