Category Archives: Writing Software

Apple WWDC videos

Brilliant work on Apple’s part in releasing all of the WWDC videos to registered developers. In previous years these were only available for a fee (I seem to remember $500), so including them is very nice.

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Big changes to Mac Developer Program

Apple have rearranged their Mac developer program so that it now costs only $99 and seems to have only one paid variant rather than the three previously available. (Student, Select, Premier). The online only variant is still available and still … Continue reading

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Rails Migrations and Schemas

A schema.rb file is typically a ruby script containing a call to the ActiveRecord::Schema.define method. A rails migration is a ruby class which inherits from ActiveRecord::Migration and contains a method called up The useful fact that I realized only after … Continue reading

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XCode function popup

I love the XCode function popup, particularly in Objective C, because I can add #pragma mark comments to divide up the list. Unfortunately languages that aren’t C derived don’t offer #pragma, so I missed these little dividers Then I noticed … Continue reading

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Reggy for regular expression testing

Handy new tool I came across today which allows you to test regular expressions and see what they select. Reggy

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Flash CS3 – Trace not producing output?

Found an odd problem with Flash CS3 today. I was working away and I realised that I wasn’t getting anything in the output window from calls to trace(). Just a completely empty output panel. The answer is simple, make sure … Continue reading

Posted in Macintosh, Writing Software | 5 Comments

XML, UTF-8 and Java

Apparently, valid UTF-8 strings aren’t necessarily valid XML. You can get a situation where you have valid UTF-8 strings which fail xml parsing. Fortunately Mark McLaren offers a solution.

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HTMLValidator 1.0

HTMLValidator 1.0 is finally released. As I write this, it’s been out since Friday, so I guess I’m a bit late in writing this. HTMLValidator 1.0 is identical to HTMLValidator 1.0b8, except of course that it 1) doesn’t expire and … Continue reading

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building antlr 2.7.7 on Mac OS X

It appears that antlr on Mac os x doesn’t like the jikes compiler, at least when I tried building antlr it gave lots of weird compile errors like this: Found 2 semantic errors compiling “ANTLRException.java”: While it would be a … Continue reading

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Java class file version numbering

http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~leif/opensource/bcver/BcVerApp.html This page has a list which shows how java class version numbers relate to java platform version numbering. It’s useful if you get one of those UnsupportedClassVersionError errors. This relates to the Java ClassFile structure which defines how classes … Continue reading

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Linux autologin

I use a collection of virtual machines in parallels for a number of things, like testing SQLEditor and running web apps that would otherwise require lots of software dependencies. However I’ve been getting tired of logging in to my linux … Continue reading

Posted in Linux, Writing Software | 1 Comment

MacFuse released – userspace Mac OS X file systems

I just noticed this announcement on the google mac blog. Amit Singh has released a mac version of Fuse, which is way for people to write interesting extensions to the file system without writing kernel code. The way it works … Continue reading

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Writing Unit tests for Cocoa

I realized something interesting today. I use unit testing to (hopefully) improve the quality of my code. With Java I use JUnit. With native Mac stuff I use OCUnit. One really clever thing about OCUnit that I realized today is … Continue reading

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Crash with WSMethodInvocationInvoke and malformed XML

I’ve been doing some stuff recently with XMLRPC for both SQLEditor and an unannounced new product. One of the key parts of XMLRPC in cocoa is the Apple web services Core. It provides almost everything you need to use web … Continue reading

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Forum for malcolmhardie.com

Following the suggestions in this article, I’ve been considering forum software recently to offer customers (and others) somewhere to discuss SQLEditor. Currently I’m considering PunBB, because it seems to be simple, fast and well received by reviewers and users. PhpBB … Continue reading

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flyspray subversion integration

Somebody asked me to post a link to the script that integrates flyspray and subversion: Script is Attached to Bug 301

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DocBook and Apple Help

One of the key tools I’ve been using recently is Docbook. Docbook is an xml-schema which can be used to write documentation for things. This can then be converted via the wonders of XSL, XML and XML-FO processors into PDF, … Continue reading

Posted in Macintosh, Writing Software | 2 Comments

SQLEditor released!

After a rather over-extended development cycle SQLEditor version 1.0 has now been released. Which is a great relief to me. I’ve been working on it for so long now that I can’t quite remember not working on it, which is … Continue reading

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Writing Documentation

I’m currently in the middle of writing user documentation of SQLEditor. I finally settled on docbook as the format of choice since it seems the most compatible with other things. I’m using this tutorial to build the stuff although saxon … Continue reading

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Integrate flyspray with CVSWeb

Currently I’m using flyspray for bug tracking. I use cvsweb to view the cvs tree online. One thing that I really wanted was to be able to click one bug numbers in the cvs log reports and see the bug … Continue reading

Posted in Internet Stuff, Writing Software | 1 Comment