My oldest child spent much of his life with a loyalty to Coca-Cola matched only by Lassie’s loyalty to Timmy, and would go thirsty before allowing any product from Pepsi-Cola to wet his gullet. He freely drank Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite, Powerade, or Dasani, but …
Read more →Every time I look at a diff, I’m reminded of the gulf between me and Linus Torvalds. I just know he’s fluent in Finnish, English, and diff, but me? I know the diff syntax. I study the semantics. Heck — I even colorize my diffs. Doesn’t matter. Each time I view …
Read more →Today’s MacZot is Guiffy SureMerge, a three-way diff/merge tool. It’s discounted 49% today only ($30 vs $59), and the Guiffy website says a license allows you to use the product on all supported platforms (Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows). Why am I excited about …
Read more →I’m a software developer, so bear in mind that my Mac is for working and coding (mostly Objective-C, Java, and Ruby). You won’t find apps for ripping DVDs, viewing videos, or playing Canasta. These are the apps I use over and over to get my job done. Note that …
Read more →I got to watch Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, being interviewed at the 2010 Gartner Symposium in Orlando this past week. Though Forbes lists him as the 33rd richest person in the world, he strikes me as the kind of rube who snaps towels at bare geriatric …
Read more →When you walk away from a Windows machine, you can press <Windows key>+L to lock the screen and keep out the bad guys. Mac OS X has no such shortcut, so the workaround I’ve been using is to go into the Security preferences and check the box that says “Require …
Read more →I’ve been working on a new project at work that deals with files in X12 format: delimited files that generally use asterisks for field delimiters and tildes for line delimiters. Here’s an example fragment: ISA*00* *00* *ZZ*XXXXXXXXXX …
Read more →Last Saturday, Michael Privat and I drove up to Atlanta to attend Cocoa Camp, a BarCamp-style un-conference focused on Cocoa. We each got two free T-shirts, got to present twice, met a lot of bright folks, learned a lot, and had a great time. Aaron Hillegass …
Read more →I was working in Java yesterday to parse a URL that had a somewhat flexible format, so I set up my unit tests, wrote the code in a declarative fashion using indexOf() and substring(), and got to greenbar. Then I looked at the code and shuddered at its …
Read more →The company I work for, Availity, LLC, provides (among other things) a web application that allows healthcare providers to submit transactions to insurance companies and get responses, all in real time. Users learn just one user interface (ours), submit the …
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