Quick and dirty way to indent JS files

01/07/2009 02:04 pm by aralbalkan.com in Development

You just got a JS file to work with that's either been minified or really badly indented. What do you do? If you're on OS X or a Linux-based system, fire up Terminal and fire off the indent command: indent < badly-indented.js > beautiful.js Since indent is actually meant for C, it may not be perfect but [...]

Just my 99 cents

01/04/2009 09:44 pm by Antti Kupila in Development

It’s MacWorld ’09 tomorrow. Two years ago Apple announced the first iPhone and people were immediately pretty psyched about it. As always the final product was kept super secret until the big boom. Sure there was speculation around it but looking back now i don’t think anybody could expect what this platform would actually create. Other [...]

Don’t zip that folder when creating an XPI on OS X

12/30/2008 05:43 pm by aralbalkan.com in Development

It's a wonderfully sunny day and you, intrepid developer, have embarked upon creating a FireFox extension. It's been a long an grueling journey but you persevered and now you're ready to install it in your browser to test it. You know that you simply need to zip it up, rename the resulting archive to give [...]

Properties in Objective C

12/27/2008 10:56 pm by aralbalkan.com in Development

I read through Aaron Hillegass's excellent Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X book and I'm now going through it again, doing the exercises. The second time round, I found it funny that in the chapter on key-value coding, Aaron mentions how he finds the new dot operator access of properties in Objective C 2.0 to [...]

Tab order in OS X

12/27/2008 08:43 pm by aralbalkan.com in Development

If you're wondering why the OS X application you're debugging isn't tabbing to the NSButton control in your interface even though you've correctly set your initialFirstResponder and nextKeyView outlets in Interface Builder, it's because you have full keyboard access disabled in your System Preferences (this is the default setting in OS X; I don't understand [...]

Permission denied (publickey) errors with git and GitHub on OS X

12/22/2008 12:06 am by aralbalkan.com in Development

Although things were working I just started getting "Permission denied (publickey)." errors while trying to push to GitHub. The solution was to create a config file under ~/.ssh/ as outlined at the bottom of the OS X section of this page. Here's the file I added, as per the instructions on the page, and my [...]

The unicode for the at sign (@)

12/21/2008 11:43 pm by aralbalkan.com in Development

Say you've got a Wordpress plugin on your site that obfuscates email addresses (like Billy Halsey's Email Obfuscator script that I'm using; I'd link to it but his site has apparently been hacked and the URL is down) and you want to circumvent the obfuscation (say you want to display a github clone URL git [...]

Changing the GitHub URL for git submodules

12/21/2008 10:33 pm by aralbalkan.com in Development

After reading the warning here about changing submodule URLs, I was worried about changing the URL for a git submodule from git://github.com/... to git@github.com:... (i.e., from my public clone URL on Github to my clone URL.) Initially, I thought it would be a good idea to only clone the shared module in one place and [...]

A note on git submodules

12/21/2008 06:10 pm by aralbalkan.com in Development

Git submodules confused me initially. Here are a few notes to clarify things: You need to pull changes to the submodules manually and commit, if you want to update them: cd mysubmodule git pull cd .. git commit -m 'Updated submodule' If you have a clone that you then want to bring up to date, you can run git submodule update. I [...]

Macports Python Google App Engine Gotcha

12/02/2008 01:35 pm by aralbalkan.com in Development

If you have Google App Engine installed via the official Mac launcher, and you also have Python installed under Macports, you might forget and try to run your app server via the Macports Python. This results in the following error: 'module' object has no attribute 'HTTPSHandler' Simply change your environment to use the system Python with python_select [...]

A novel approach to hiding files

11/28/2008 05:12 pm by aralbalkan.com in Development

Although I'm usually a proponent of doing things in the open — when it comes to software development, of course — I stumbled upon this little gem while reading up on the difference between hard links and soft links on UNIX-based systems: Have you ever wondered how you could hide a temporary file? Well, you could [...]

Firefox 3’s feed subscription feature: convenience for the masses or a dangerous precedent?

11/12/2008 05:36 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

Bug or feature? There's something about Firefox that's been bugging me for a long time now and, more than being a mere inconvenience, I feel that it is a design decision that Mozilla took that runs counter to the spirit of the web as an open platform. At first sight, the feature I'm talking about seems harmless [...]

Yahoo! Pipes breaks for Flash if you customize your pipe URLs

10/06/2008 07:12 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

I love Yahoo! Pipes. It has saved my butt on several occasions when I've needed to transform feeds. However, I think I broke it (for myself, at least) by customizing the URL for my pipes. When you do that, you lose the ability to refer to your pipes using the yahooapis.com domain and thus you cannot [...]

Dictionary lookup removed for request object in Django 1.0 and other fun facts.

10/01/2008 04:50 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

Porting pre 1.0 Django to 1.0 is apparently not a walk in the park. For one thing django.core.validators, which I was using, was removed. The fix: copy it back from the earlier version. Not sure if it was a bad practice or not but I was also doing dictionary lookups on the request object and that's [...]

Stack Overflow goes live

09/15/2008 09:45 pm by Antti Kupila in Development

The name Joel Spolsky may or may not ring a bell in your head. If not, maybe Jeff Atwood or the site codinghorror.com? Well, these guys have got together and built a resource for programmers. The goal of the project is simply to “”. The site launched for the general public today. I’ve been following the [...]

Versions

09/06/2008 10:20 pm by Tink in Development

For those on OSX who haven’t found Versions yet, its a great Subversion client for Mac. At the moment the product is still in beta, each installation coming with a time limitation (usually replaced for free with another beta). Once released you’ll be able to buy Versions, unfortunately there’s no realy info on what sort of [...]

Regular expressions: repeating a capturing group and making the inner group non-repeating

08/09/2008 05:36 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

In the dark old days when I was working on a Windows laptop, I used to use a tool called RegexBuddy to help me write regular expressions. Up until recently, I didn't really get regular expressions. Working with Django forced me to change that and I'm so thankful I took the time to delve deeper [...]

Flash AS3 optimization - Fastest way to copy an array

08/05/2008 12:13 am by Agit8 in Dev

Been having an interesting discussion on the papervision3d channel on freenode. (irc.freenode.net #papervision3d) The question asked by a member was: “What’s the fastest way to copy an array in flash as3?” So Tom Richardson and I made some tests for fun and profit (some guys bet a beer and pizza to Tom that a simple [...]

jsontime for Google App Engine

07/10/2008 04:58 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

From the Simon Willison/Natalie Downe dream team comes yet another very useful service for Google App Engine developers: jsontime. I have been meaning to blog about this for some time (no pun intended!) Simon and Natalie have uploaded the 500 or so files that are in the pytz library so you don't have to and built a [...]

Google App Engine: no support, quotas, throttling… Help!

07/10/2008 01:29 pm by Aral Balkan in Development

I wrote to Google on April 19th, 2008 to ask for the quotas to be lifted on the upcoming new web site for the Singularity Web Conference. I still haven't heard back from them. On April 23rd, I wrote to Kevin Marks, whom I'd met at the excellent LIFT conference, to tell him how excited I [...]

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