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kill -9 blog

Josh M — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 13:06:51 +0000

I’ve stopped posting to this blog; I use this one instead, now.

What is the point of TextMate?

Josh M — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 23:59:25 +0000

Since starting to write Rails apps, I hear people rave about TextMate but really I don’t see the point. What’s so great about it? I used it for the duration of the trial but during that time I felt completely under-powered. RubyMine, on the hand, had pretty much zero learning curve, easy to debug with breakpoints, and everything Rails-related accessible from the menus. Memory footprint is bit bigger, but so what? Memory is cheap. I can have debug sessions in both RubyMine and Flash Builder open at the same time and my laptop doesn’t creak. TextMate on the other hand seems entirely mystifying. I’ve heard it’s the editor you want if you’re comfortable with the shell, which I am, but I still don’t get it. I would rather have a convenient modern IDE that works the way I expect it. I still feel like I’m missing something though, so feel free to shoot me down in the comments …

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IntelliJ IDEA + Flex

Josh M — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:59:14 +0000

My MacBook is getting a bit weather-beaten and I’m thinking of a getting a replacement. Maybe a PC laptop this time (cheaper) which means I would run Ubuntu. The only problem is that Flex Builder 3 for Linux is only at alpha stage, and there is no official date for a full release as far as I know.

So I’m thinking about alternatives. IntelliJ offers Flex development support. It would be nice to say goodbye to the Eclipse platform. Has anyone out there used IntelliJ for Flex dev, and if so, can you comment on your experiences? Ta.

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FlexORM

Josh M — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 18:40:59 +0000

Taking a look at the FlexORM system for AIR development and it’s brilliant. About a year ago I was wishing there was something like this and now here it is! Great job from the Codec people.

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Slow Leopard

Josh M — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:28:31 +0000

Ever since I’ve installed Snow Leopard on my Macbook it’s incredibly slow to boot up. It shows the Apple logo and the spinning wheel for around the normal length of time, then there’s a long wait (between 2 and 10 minutes) with a pale blue screen. Eventually the login window appears.

I’ve seen a lot of similar problems on forums around the web.

I thought one of Snow Leopard’s selling points was that it was faster to boot up than previous versions of OS X. And one of the Mac’s selling points was that it did not screw you around with the ‘Blue Screen Of Death’. This isn’t death exactly … more the Azure Screen Of Coma.

If Adobe hadn’t abandoned development of FB/Linux (vote against this folly), I would wipe OS X off my Macbook and run Ubuntu.

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ASAXB: JAXB for AS3

Josh M — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:29:00 +0000

In April last year I was thinking out loud about how a JAXB-for-AS3 would be a good thing. I didn’t pursue it much, had a couple of ideas that turned out to be dead ends. So I forgot all about it.

Lo and behold, though, someone (independently) had very similar thoughts and acted on them. Conrad Winchester and a couple other folks have begun work on ASAXB, which looks like a very promising project. I am keen to get an AS3 implementation of xjc happening to complement the marshalling / unmarshalling code that’s already been written. Once we’ve got the next round of features build at makebook, I will have a little more time to work on it.

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Mail servers

Josh M — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:19:46 +0000

I just set up Postfix and Dovecot on my Ubuntu VPS … thanks to this tutorial it was … not painless exactly, but not half as bad as I was afraid it would be. Great tutorial, highly recommended – it’s for Debian but I think there was only one small change required to use it for Ubuntu (specify “multiverse” instead of “non-free” in the package sources) …

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A native Norton Commander clone for OS X

Josh M — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 04:53:09 +0000

At last, an orthodox file manager for OS X … that is, not just something that runs on OS X (like the Java app muCommander or KDE’s Krusader, which runs via X Windows), but a proper native app. I’ve just installed XFolders, and it’s brilliant – sehr gut!

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Makebook: next gen flex app for writers (fp10)

Josh M — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:08:21 +0000

Isn’t it a great feeling when a project that you’ve been working on for a long time finally goes live?

Introducing Makebook: a web app that lets you create books and manage a library of stories, recipes, poems, whatever … I’ve been developing the Flex front end for about 7-8 months now, and it’s been an interesting ride. It’s requires Flash 10 — it’s on the bleeding edge in some respects. I have the sleep deprivation to prove it :)

Here’s a screenshot of the editor:

I would love to talk about the set of features that we’re working on next, but that would spoil the surprise now wouldn’t it :)

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Sydney Uni email FAIL

Josh M — Mon, 18 May 2009 07:26:12 +0000

I just tried logging in to my Sydney Uni email and found they’ve switched to Outlook Web Access.

What a staggering piece of stupidity. Locking an academic email facility in to a commercial third party is a wrong move in the first place. Given that they made this bad decision, why use Outlook Web Access and not a decent one like GMail?

Best option would have been to install some decent open source system like Zimbra or AtMail …

No doubt it made sense on some managerese-encoded list of strategic gibberish, but it’s a poor choice both technically and ethically.

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