Category Archives: Writing Software

SQLEditor upgrades

One of the big questions I’ve been thinking about recently is how to price upgrades for SQLEditor. So far upgrades have all been free as 1.0 became 1.1 and eventually 1.7. But with the new 2.0 release appearing soon, the … Continue reading

Posted in Company News, General, SQLEditor, Writing Software | 1 Comment

Xcode 4 – Great!

Xcode 4 took a little while to get used to, but as I’ve been using it more, I’ve been liking it more. The change initially is significant, and there were new ways of doing things and certain other things that … Continue reading

Posted in Macintosh, Writing Software | 2 Comments

SQLEditor now zip file not a dmg

In a change that will probably affect almost nobody at all, SQLEditor is now being distributed with a zip file rather than a dmg as the default download. Why? Zip files are simpler to create It prevents the problem of … Continue reading

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Mac OS X will still have Java in the future.

There has been lots of stuff written recently about how Java on the Mac has been deprecated. The reality is that one particular Java runtime has been deprecated: the one that Apple write themselves. Java as a language will still … Continue reading

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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

Posted in Writing Software | Tagged , | 2 Comments

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 | 6 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

Posted in Internet Stuff, SQLEditor, Writing Software | Leave a comment

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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