Fixing the Xcode Project Templates
I recently upgraded my copy of Xcode and installed the iPhone SDK. A short while later, while following an example in the Pragmatic Programmer’s Cocoa Programming book, I found that my copy of Xcode wasn’t creating some key files.
Ruby Manor
Ruby Manor is one of those alternative conferences. It’s not run for a profit. It doesn’t cost a lot of money to attend (at £8 per head you pay just enough to cover the cost of the room and equipment), and the quality of the talks is consistently high.
I spent most of the day typing frantically, but I didn’t manage to capture everything. The photos that are littered through my write up of the day are all thanks to @glenngillen from Rubypond, who was sat next to me snapping away.
3 Unix commands for finding performance problems
A user recently reported poor performance on one of our Rails apps. I pulled up New Relic’s performance graphs and checked what was happening around the time that we received the email. Sure enough there was a massive spike over a 10 minute period in the time taken to serve a request.
Tools of the trade
Peter Cooper of Ruby Inside recently asked if people wanted to write about the things that they use in their development work. So I jumped squarely onto that band wagon…
URL shortener for Basecamp
Basecamp’s UI has one failing that keeps causing me problems – it can’t layout messages that contain long unwrappable URLs. I decided to fix it, and wrote a link shortening user script for Fluid and Basecamp.
Benchmarking Ruby exception handling
Which is better, handling an exception or explicitly checking to see whether or not your code is going to break? The answer is “it depends”. On the one hand exception handling allows us to write more legible code (often summed up by the saying “it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission”). On the other, handling an exception is often a costly operation; it can be faster to “look before you leap”.
Installing Nokogiri on Leopard
Nokogiri complains that the version of libxml2 installed on Mac OS X Leopard is over 4 years out of date. Well we can’t have that now can we!
Merging Nesta's categories and articles
My developer friendly CMS (Nesta) has just undergone some really positive refactoring. Articles and categories are a great way to organise a blog; they’re user friendly and search engines love them. So nothing’s changed there; I still want articles and categories. However, I’ve been using Nesta on e-commerce sites recently and have been finding that Nesta, as a general purpose CMS, didn’t quite cut it.