What hackers and painters have in common is that they’re both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things. – Paul Graham There’s been a lot of talk lately about what it means to be a programmer. Patio11 has a fantastic article about not […]
I’ve had (what I suspect) to be some bad seconds on some Hitachi disks. The recommended tool to diagnose and repair such disks is Hitachi DFT. Unfortunately, the Hitachi DFT utility only runs in what appears to be real-mode DOS. They do provide ISOs and floppy disk images though, which are fairly easy to burn […]
Remember those jokes about studying by osmosis back in undergrad? Put the textbook under your pillow and learn in your sleep! That was a funny joke, at least the first time, right? Right? It turns out the whole world runs on the same principle behind “learning by osmosis”. “We have this problem, let’s do something totally arbitrary and […]
As part of a not-so-secret project, I’m writing a python script to make git commits on my behalf. I’d like these commits to be made “from” a different user. GitHub in fact has a page on multiple SSH key usage, which makes the entire process look deceptively simple. Just create an alternate domain name and […]
Have you ever sworn that you commited feature X, but now can’t find it? git log shows nothing? It’s possible that you committed them while you had a detached head. Oops. And it turns out that not even “git log –all”, you know, shows you all: –all: Pretend as if all the refs in $GIT_DIR/refs/ […]
I’m afraid that this post is a little longwinded, and I take a long time to arrive at my point. I hope you will stick with me, as I think it is a valuable insight. It just takes some time to get there. There are two ways to deal with bugs. The first way is […]
It seems like every time a new feature gets checked in, somebody fails to add it to the test target, and I get a linker error like this one: Apple Mach-O Linker (ld) Error: _OBJC_CLASS_$_CLASSNAME referenced from… The solution to this is not to just keep adding files to the test target. If you compile […]
I “ported” thorncp’s fsck to objective-C this week. fsck lets you tell the compiler how you really feel. Disclaimer: Although fully functional, this is a joke / prank project. Do not actually use it in production. Examples Convenience constructors got you down? Just Tired of boxing primitive types? Show the compiler who’s boss! Keep forgetting […]
If after upgrading to 10.7 Lion and XCode 4.1, your UI Automation bag-of-hacks goes to hell, you’re in good company. Every time I try to run an automation test, the UI locks up–hard–but without the beachball of death. Fortunately, command-tabbing back and forth between the iOS Simulator and Instruments a few times seems to clear […]
UI accessibility labels being randomly set to nil, even though you’re positive you set them in the .nib? User interface elements randomly don’t have the right accessibility name or accessibility value? Here’s a magical, 100% undocumented fix: Hit settings.app on the simulator In General, flip “Accessibility Inspector” to ON In the rainbow-colored floating Accessibility Inspector that appears, […]