http://alexvollmer.com Latest posts from Alex Vollmer 2010-06-13T15:10:14PDT http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2010/06/13/a-tale-of-two-cultures/ one of its greatest practitioners and consider it one of the core disciplines of the way I go about my profession. So when I first started doing Cocoa programming in earnest I was shocked at the state of automated testing. Compared to my experiences on other platforms, the tools are archaic and backwards. Moreover, the philosophy of testing just doesn't seem to be baked into the DNA of the Cocoa community. Nobody seems to be talking about it much. So I've just suffered with old-fashioned head-against-wall development without the comforting support of TDD. But I don't know how much longer I can take it. Am I crazy for wanting TDD in Cocoa, or are the two simply incompatible? ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2010/06/01/cocoas-broken-tests/ NSLocalizedString macro along with locale-specific strings files, you will handle 99.9% of your localization needs. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2010/05/21/the-international-colors-of-iphoneos/ Ooooh, you must be thinking, what a posh title this is! Okay, I'll admit to copping a bit of a grandiose attitude when I came up with this, but hear me out on this one. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2010/05/07/visual-affordance-in-a-touch-enabled-world/ Voices That Matter iPhone Developer's conference. The content was great, but aside from John "Wolf" Rentzch's Core Data talk, the quality of the slides and presentation was pretty lacking. I'm not here to dogpile on those speakers. I still got a lot out of their talks, but the experience crystallized some important rules for me about technical presentations. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2010/04/30/on-technical-presentations/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2010/04/23/menubar-ghetto/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2010/04/17/thanks-mom/ hate breaking up my flow by having to reach for the mouse, I put together a couple of AppleScripts that bind hot-keys to switching between SDKs. Download these two scripts to wherever you like to store your AppleScripts. I like to put mine in ~/Library/Scripts. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2010/03/06/scripting-build-selection-in-xcode/ RVM is a nifty tool for managing multiple ruby installations. Not only does it make it easy to install and switch between multiple rubies, but you can also install gems without sudo access. But, as great as RVM is, I still have to remember to switch between rubies and often I don't remember to do it until I see some weird behavior or a test breaks. I'm very lazy and I want even more. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2010/02/27/rvm-meets-zsh/ cool kids were doing it. But, most importantly, I wanted to give the site design a reboot—something I did not want to do in PHP in the form of Wordpress themes. So with a little help from a friend, this site got a facelift and a new platform to boot. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2010/02/22/static-cling/ After letting the dust settle around Apple's announcement of the iPad, I wanted to take a more measured, less reactionary look at the new device. The coverage that immediately followed the announcement was even more biased to both extremes than coverage of the President's State of the Union address which occurred the same day. I know that there's a growing body of folks who just don't like Apple, but I was surprised at the level of antipathy. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2010/01/31/the-ipad/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2010/01/10/prototyping-with-briefs/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2010/01/07/tools-of-2009/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/12/15/all-time-lineup/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/12/11/building-a-knowledge-base/ Gemcutter. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/11/07/cleaning-out-the-closet/ git rebase. You can just do a mixed reset of the last commit, stage the bits you want in one commit, stage the next bits and put that in a separate commit. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/10/09/the-cleverest-git-maneuver-i-ever-pulled-off/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/10/03/clip-version-1-0-2-has-been-released/ Evri. While I have cultivated a long-standing antipathy towards the Grateful Dead, I'll co-opt one of their song titles and simply mutter, "what a long strange trip it's been". I started out at Evri when it was still just a twinkle in somebody's eye. Since then I've seen it grow and mutate in ways I would have never imagined. I got to work on a lot of cool stuff and learn a bunch of new things. The best part, like any good job, was having the opportunity to work with some really great people. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/10/02/the-end-of-an-era-2/ PeepCode screencasts for the iPhone SDK I've been co-writing with Geoffrey Grosenbach. The first one (done in two parts) covers View Controller basics. We decided to start with View Controllers because they are at the core of all "productivity"-style applications. Once you have them down, you can start to put some meat on the bones of your iPhone apps. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/09/15/iphone-screencasts/ ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/08/19/evriverse-2-0/ without having explicit knowledge of one another. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/06/25/cocoas-ways-of-talking/ Evernote, are where the future is because it reduces the major hurdle of access for users. As time goes on users are going to expect applications to be available in a bunch of different ways that all need to work together. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/05/27/the-iphone-and-web-apis/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/05/15/peepcode-meets-macruby/ EvriVerse iPhone application for work. Since the end of 2008 I've been getting more and more into Cocoa for both the iPhone and Mac. The more I work on it, the more fun I have. I've got several side-projects in mind so I'll be spending a lot more time in Cocoa-land and, as a result, blogging and tweeting about it a lot more. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/05/15/typeahead-search-on-the-iphone/ ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/05/12/introducing-the-evriverse/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/05/08/the-great-git-setup/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/03/14/using-git-as-a-safety-net/ work I've been migrating a home-grown REST framework over to the Jersey project (the reference implementation of JSR-311 or, JAX-RS). Previously I had done some work moving JRuby into the VM and launching Merb. It was satisfying to figure out how to do that, but involved an awful lot of wiring and special-casing. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/03/04/what-jersey-means-to-java/ The Chronicles of Stuff Alex Figures out at Work, our intrepid hero figures out how to run Merb inside an embedded Jetty instance! ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/02/11/you-put-merb-in-my-jetty/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/01/31/rewriting-history-with-git/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/01/27/opening-the-gatesof-hell/ work, we do a lot of scheduled tasks in which we process a "chunk" of data within a particular time-period. For example, we may tail log files, parse the lines and publish summary statistics "up-stream" on a fixed schedule of, say, ten minutes. Similarly, last week we were working on a Ruby wrapper script that launches memcached and maintains a registration lease within a home-grown registration service we run. The script needs to launch memcached, then periodically check it and renew its registration lease. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/01/26/ruby-threads-suckjust-not-the-way-you-think-they-do/ Meet Emacs Peepcode Screencast, I put together my own humble little screencast this weekend on magit, a fantastic git mode for Emacs. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/01/18/meet-magit/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/01/07/clip-version-101-has-been-released/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/01/04/activerecord-associations-and-counters/ ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2009/01/01/the-fast-and-the-quick/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/12/23/flaccid-attitudes/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/12/21/burning-my-ships/ ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/12/18/a-tale-of-sandwiches-and-happiness/ moochbot, it was fun to take a lighter turn this week. Today I put up http://isthatfreedomrock.com. If you are lucky enough to have watched cable in the late 80's you might remember a TV ad in which two hippies sit in front of a VW bus doing their best Cheech & Chong routine. One hippy says to another, "is that freedom rock? Then turn it up!" I don't know why, but that has always been funny to me. It's just so…stupid. Can you imagine the ad execs sitting around the table thinking this one up? ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/12/16/just-having-fun/ moochbot. In no particular order is a list of this evening's "a-ha" moments: ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/12/11/this-evenings-moochbot-lessons/ ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/12/10/moochbot-is-out/ you should send the dates in GMT so that I can search correctly…" I don't think this conversational style is uncommon among developers. Clearly it's not logically correct—it's not me sending dates, it's my code. It's not him who is searching, it's his code. Why do we do this? ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/12/09/code-personification/ this close to flipping the on switch—but in the meantime I've still got some "i"s to dot and "t"s to cross. One of those was switching from in-request mail delivery to asynchronous mail delivery. The app I've been working on involves two parties marching a particular transaction through a variety of state transitions, each of which usually sends an email to either or both parties. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/11/06/asynchronous-mail-with-delayedjob-god-daemons/ re-surveying the infographics of some of the major online publishers. This is by no means comprehensive, and doesn't consider a lot of the interesting visualizations that some folks are doing. I consciously stuck with the mainstream to see how design innovation was trickling down into conservative publishers. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/11/05/election-infographics-redux/ why does this bug me so much? I think the answer is that requiring so much code for such a relatively trivial task violates my sense of proportionality in the code. I hate having to say so much more about this teeny little task than I do about the "theme" of my code. I think it distorts the narrative of the code. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/10/26/proportional-code/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/10/07/back-to-myemacs/ Extreme Programming book as soon as it was released and is a long-time practitioner, I feel qualified to comment on this. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/10/02/a-philosophy-of-testing/ stop wrapping error fields with extra div tags. Did you know that? Maybe you never noticed, but when you use the field helper methods, like text_field, password_field, etc, Rails will wrap fields with errors in a <div> with the class 'fieldWithErrors'. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/09/23/make-view-helpers-a-little-less-helpful/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/09/19/clip-100-released/ Oracle's home page today. Here's what I got: ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/09/19/oracles-listening/ ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/08/15/book-review-javascript-the-good-parts/ About Face is one of those pillars of UI/UX design, the reading of which is a rite of passage. I figured few books would be more appropriate as a capstone to my long list of design-oriented reads. It is nearly an institution in and of itself. Last night I turned the final page and ticked a pretty big 560-page book off of my reading list. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/07/30/book-review-about-face-3/ ActiveRecord. After essentially walking through all of the possible ActiveRecord options in this setup, I finally stumbled upon a configuration that seems to work. So this post is an attempt to help the next poor bastard who is Googling in earnest for a solution to a similar problem. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/07/24/activerecord-fun-thay-may-stump-only-me/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/07/10/clip-version-006-has-been-released/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/06/28/military-history/ gemdoc, which allows you to quickly get to the HTML docs for installed gems via command-line. Unfortunately I abandoned bash years ago for zsh and Stephen's shell bits needed a little porting. For me, zsh, is a bit like swiss-army knife where about 95% of it is a mystery to me, but the 5% I use I couldn't live without. So simply switching back to bash is a no-go. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/06/25/gemdoc-completion-in-zsh/ ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/06/24/launch-day/ and the marshmallow in a s'more. You stuff a chunk of chocolate (we prefer good old-fashioned Hershey's waxy American milk chocolate) inside the mallow and then toast the entire unit. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/06/21/smorgasm/ Robert Hoekman Jr's site which was described as great design books for programmers. I fully recognize the fact that I really don't have that little spark that good designers have, but I'd like to be better at it than I am. So I've been eager to find usability and design books that work for visually-clumsy folks like me. Robert Hoekman's pair of books, Designing the Obvious and Designing the Moment were wonderful additions to my growing design-for-code-dorks library. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/06/20/book-reviews-designing-the-obviousdesigning-the-moment/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/06/19/somebody-hates-me/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/06/14/it-would-be-nice-if/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/06/13/clip-version-005-has-been-released/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/06/07/the-end-of-an-era/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/06/07/clip-version-004-has-been-released/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/06/03/railsconf-08-wrapup/ Merlin Mann tweet. The app is called 1Password and, to paraphrase Mr. Mann's original tweet, it solves a problem I didn't even realize I had. Well...that's not entirely true. I knew that the various passwords I have scattered across the net weren't as secure as they could be. I had heard of master-password apps but hadn't really done much research on them. Now I'm not going to bother because 1Password so completely blew me away that I went ahead and bought the license (more on that in a bit). ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/05/26/1password-to-rule-them-all/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/05/24/passing-the-mom-test/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/05/21/clip-version-002-has-been-released/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/04/24/the-great-music-backup/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/04/12/clip-version-001-has-been-released/ I wrote about my strategy for synchronizing between two machines using Amazon's S3 and the JungleDisk tool. I just wanted to post a quick update that refines that strategy a bit. First, let me describe what needed improvement. I sync the ~/Documents directory between my home and work MacBooks. However, on my home machine I have some extra files that really don't belong on my work machine (like Quicken files), so I have a small text file (called sync_files) that enumerates which sub-directories and file in ~/Documents are to be synchronized between the two machines.This all worked pretty well until I noticed duplicates of files appearing in different places. I realized that what had happened was that I had moved the files on one of the disks and then sync'd with S3. With my current scripts this resulted in copying the file to the new location, but not removing the old one.So with a quick glance at the rsync man-page, I found the --delete option. I refined my scripts and ran them. It all looked good--until I got home. Oops, I just lost a whole bunch of files. Uh-oh. It turns out I forgot to use the sync_files file for both directions. This was an easy tweak but reminded me of the Golden Rule of Rsync: ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/04/05/s3-sync-update/ pci4r project. First, congrats to Sandro Paganotti for the first commit to pci4r--the prize is in the mail. This morning, after a bit of git-fiddling, I managed to get the second commit for the project in. It's code for document classification, which is the topic of Chapter 6 of Toby Segaran's "Programming Collective Intelligence". I deviated quite a bit from Toby's original code. In some cases this was simply a side-effect of porting from Python to idiomatic Ruby. In other cases though changes were made for simple aesthetic reasons. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/03/23/pci4r-update/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/03/13/one-geeks-aesthetics/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/03/07/book-review-information-dashboard-design/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/03/04/green-fields/ Firefox. What could possibly be more direct than thinking, fire that missile, and seeing that missile burst forth from under the wing? Unfortunately, since most of us work on slightly less fantastic technologies than those portrayed in the movie, we have to figure how to work best within our milieu. This is the real challenge of what we do. How can we take the crude medium of computer software and diminish the distance between thinking and doing? ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/02/19/fat-proxies-and-the-danger-of-reuse/ ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/02/11/shopping-for-men/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/02/10/washington-caucuses/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/02/06/a-survey-of-super-tuesday-infographics/ ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/02/02/high-resolution/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/02/01/geek-manners/ growing and growing. I've looked at .mac a couple of times but couldn't really find a good reason to get on board. Oh sure it has some nice features like syncing contacts, but honestly most of the features .mac offers I don't or can get in other ways. In short it's hard to imagine ponying up $99 for this service when it can be beaten with other tools. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2008/01/21/poor-mans-mac/ Steve Yegge's latest blog post was one that really struck a chord with me personally. I think he hit most of the nail right on the head in describing a common frustration with the Java language. It seems like every attempt to refine the language ends up as some controversial, inelegant hack that often reduces the readability of the code. The same day I read that post I came across Josh Bloch's presentation on Java closures. This was my first introduction to closures in Java-land and my first reaction was one of horror. This is supposed to enhance the expressiveness of the language? Sheesh, not as far as I can tell… ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/12/30/the-java-conundrum/ finally get a working setup with Ruby on Leopard with RSpec and TextMate. Life is good, I have my pretty spec runner window back, I’m a BDD’ing fool. But oh no, I have to keep fiddling with stuff. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/12/16/yet-more-rspec-fun-with-textmate/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/12/15/putting-leopard-back-together/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/12/10/close-the-laptop/ shiny happy new Leopard features. I knew that first-class Ruby support was coming so I figured I would abandon my MacPorts install and go with what Mr. Jobs deigned to give me. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/12/06/ruby-and-leopard/ "Programming Collective Intelligence", my motivation finally exceeded my laziness in getting the porting code available in a public place. So I’m proud to announce that you can take a look at the ongoing porting effort at my Ruby port of Programming Collective Intelligence. I'm in the midst of Chapter 4 right now, so I still have a long way to go. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/12/01/ruby-port-of-programming-collective-intelligence/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/12/01/many-spinning-plates/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/10/29/happy-mac-day-to-me-happy-mac-day-to-me/ /system?sport=football&team=seahawks&year=2006 vs. /football/seattle_seahawks/2006). ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/10/26/how-to-make-urls/ Monday Morning Quarterback, here are ten things that I think I think: ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/10/17/ten-things-i-think-i-think/ always felt like this anytime I've had to do some Swing programming. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/09/07/the-ache-of-swing-programming/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/07/19/pro-social-code/ Peter Morville & Louis Rosenfeld ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/07/08/book-review-information-architecture-for-the-world-wide-web/ Ruby On Rails Podcast. In particular the last two episodes, about women in computing, really got me thinking about education and technology. If you haven't had a chance to check them out, they are worth listening to. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/07/04/daughters-in-computing/ Leonard Richardson's and Sam Ruby's "RESTful Web Services" book that I picked up at RailsConf. One of the thoughts that has been bouncing around in my head is how web service-oriented the book was and, besides a chapter about Ajax, said very little about how REST applied to user-facing web applications. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/06/27/why-cant-web-apps-be-rest-ful/ Esther Derby and Diana Larsen ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/06/23/book-review-agile-retrospectives/ Steve Krug ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/06/23/book-review-dont-make-me-think/ Leonard Richardson & Sam Ruby ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/06/23/book-review-restful-web-services/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/06/13/why-rest-matters/ rubyforge command, I finally got a gem released for my little Camping app, Chikkin In A Bukket. Yaaayyy! ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/06/09/my-first-rubygem/ RailsConf I headed off to a family trip to Southern California. I only just got back this weekend and I feel like I haven't quite had the time to fully digest the conference. As a result I've had a lot of odd thoughts rattling around in my head, most of which have failed to form into anything cogent. Well, except for one.. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/06/01/getting-leverage/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/05/20/day-three-railsconf-07-summary/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/05/19/day-two-rails-conf-07-summary/ http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/05/18/day-two-railsconf-07-dhhs-keynote-address/ here. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/05/18/day-one-afternoon-railsconf-2007-patterns-to-dry-up-your-views/ here. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/05/17/day-one-rails-conf-2007-morning-session/ feedbag blog and started this one since the topics I want to write about have grown beyond the scope of working on feedbag. Working on feedbag was a great experience, but I have since started new side-projects and a fantastic new job, thereby putting feedbag on the back-burner. ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2007/05/15/leading-off/ updated 1/23/2006 ]]> http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2005/12/14/using-closures-to-support-object-oriented-ajax/