Sam’s random musings

How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot in Any Programming Language:

fullduplex.org » How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot in Any Programming Language The proliferation of modern programming languages (all of which seem to have stolen countless features from one another) sometimes makes it difficult to remember what language you’re currently using. This guide is offered as a public service to help programmers who [...]

Oh man so true so true

(Via Mind-NOX.)

Giggle of the Day: if Microsoft made vi:

Giggle of the Day: if Microsoft made vi:

As face says not quite safe for work, but funny! (you might have to be really really geeky to find it funny

(Via Mind-NOX.)

Nesting of folders has exceeded the recommended limit of 100:

If Disk Utility reports Nesting of folders has exceeded the recommended limit of 100, you can find the offending folders by opening a Terminal window and typing
sudo find / -maxdepth 100 -mindepth 100
The last few times I had people report this error to me, they turned out to have an old version of Vapor on their machine.”

Good to have this little snip in my pocket

(Via jpb’s Tech Notes.)

Taming Launchd:

Developers, and some power users who are reading this have probably heard of launchd. It’s Apple’s ‘mama process,’ responsible for launching other processes at startup, login, at regular intervals, or on demand. If you open the Activity Monitor application, and view ‘All Processes, Hierarchically,’ you’ll see that there are only two top-level processes: kernel_task, and launchd. The kernel sits there and does its thing, while launchd spawns all the other processes that make up your Macintosh computing experience.

Some good insight into this relative newcomer to Mac OS X as a way or launching and running services of various kinds in the background, some good notes on the things that don’t work quite as expected (bugs) and some ways it is used now. Also some links to two of the editors for launchd files.

(Via Red Sweater Blog.)

Design Review Tips:

(Via Bug Bash.)

So there is a post floating around with some totally disjointed reasons why he can’t handle his new Mac. You can read the article if you want, but believe me the responses from around the way are much better reading

Flame: My birthday present to me:

A fellow named “Larry Bodine”, who is apparently on the advisory board of “Law Technology News” (eg, he’s a technology advisor) and is also a law firm marketing consultant, has written a piece where describes, using no small amount of factual errors, fallacies, and other bad writing techniques, why he doesn’t like the Mac.

Good luck! And good riddance! I’d buy it myself but I’m afraid you might have smeared some stupid on it!

(Via Call Me Fishmeal..)

Can an operating system sue for libel?:

Well that’s your first mistake. Boat anchors will not run Mac OS X, nor Word. It will run NetBSD, however.

(Via tales of being tj..)

Larry doesn’t like his Mac:

Law marketing consultant Larry Bodine had some problems with his new Mac. Now, some of his complaints sound pretty serious and I don’t blame him for wanting to deal with them. But Larry, there’s a few things you mention that I thought maybe I could help you with.

(Via Giles Turnbull @ MacDevCenter.com Blog.)

A consultant who lies? Well shut my mouth.:

The article, dated … um … tomorrow is by Chicago-based marketing consultant Larry Bodine. Titled “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” the article describes Larry’s nightmarish experience with a Power Macintosh G5 computer.
Or does it?

(Via The Shape of Days.)

FileBrowse - a media browser companion for Finder:

Romain Guy at The Apple Blog has penned a nice walkthrough of an interesting new app called FileBrowse, which acts as more of a streamlined tool for media file browsing and manipulating tasks, as opposed to a full-fledged Finder replacement (cuz we all know how well that’s going). FileBrowse makes use of subtle display and 3D elements to provide more information when rooting through folders of images, music and video. As you can see, it draws Windows XP-like thumbnails on folders of images, allowing one to peek at what’s inside without actually having to crack it open. It also offers far more information (like metadata) when viewing items individually, and it even renders album artwork on music folders, along with video file previews, a unique visual grouping system, and more.

FileBrowse looks like an interesting app, so check out Romain’s walkthrough if you’ve been feeling the Finder is a bit lacking in these departments lately. At $25 though, it probably won’t be for everyone, but it’s nice to see some new file browsing tools that focus on a few things, and doing them well.

This is one of the nicest ui’s for browsing the filesystem of images and other filetypes) that I have seen in a long time.

(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)

Commoditizing PHP security:

We think it’s time to commoditize PHP web application security. You may have heard of Chorizo!. We’re proud to announce that from now on it’s possible to register for a free account on chorizo-scanner.com.

We think that everyone should be able to find usual security bugs like XSS (especially with nowadays Web2.0 applications), SQL injection (i.e. in MySQL queries), Remote Code inclusion/execution, Session injection, PHP vulnerabilities and the like. As Chorizo! is based on a plugin architecture, it is likely that we’ll add more and more plugins for detecting new vulnerabilites.

This might be a good and worthwhile thing to investigate for some projects. So does one build in the cost to the development… or maintenance?

(Via Planet MySQL.)