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December 23, 2007

Version numbers

I've always been a little confused by Apple's "Property List Key Reference". It seemed that the documented purpose of some of the property list keys deviated from the actual behaviour of the OS, especial in relation with the display of...

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Posted by wincent at 10:41 PM

December 21, 2007

Involuntary Reboot Log #22

When I got home my machine, which had been up for about a day and had a bunch of in-progress work in open applications, started acting funny. New Terminal windows were totally blank (neither the command prompt nor any other...

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Posted by wincent at 10:21 AM

December 20, 2007

New keyboard

Lately the crusty old white keyboard that came with my iMac has been getting harder and harder to use. Key combinations were getting hard to type because the Command key would stick at the top unless you pushed down really...

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Posted by wincent at 12:18 PM

December 18, 2007

Assigning keyboard shortcuts to user scripts in Xcode 3

You used to be able to do this prior to Xcode 3, but I can't see how to do this in the current release. Anyone know how? Without this feature the scripts menu becomes next to useless (for my usage...

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Posted by wincent at 12:00 PM

December 15, 2007

Memory management tips under Garbage Collection

The CFRelease function Good old-fashioned reference counting (with retain and release) has been thrown out the window in the brave new Garbage Collected world. Core Foundation objects are Garbage Collected too, but they continue to use a reference counting layer...

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Posted by wincent at 2:14 PM

December 14, 2007

RSpec 1.1.0

The release notes belie the scope of the changes in this RSpec release. It's been a long time, and this is a huge release with, for me, three big things: the "Story Runner" nested example groups total and seamless interoperability...

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Posted by wincent at 9:11 AM

December 11, 2007

What is a "release candidate"?

A limited definition of "release candidate" is "these are the exact binary bits that we think we'll be shipping; and if no show-stopping bugs are reported we'll go ahead and ship these exact bits". Personally, I like to nuance this...

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Posted by wincent at 2:02 PM

December 8, 2007

On Perl's beauty

From a comment on this Slashdot story: Every year the design for Perl 6 becomes more and more contorted and ultra-complicated, basically taking every cool feature Larry sees in other languages and mashing them together into an incoherent Mulligan stew....

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Posted by wincent at 6:44 PM

December 5, 2007

Xcode tip: kill the index

Just now Xcode crashed while in the background. I immediately checked for project.pbxproj corruption but Git showed me that the file was unchanged. Each time I tried to open the project Xcode would beachball for a few seconds and then...

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Posted by wincent at 1:35 PM

Bash completion for Git

If you're using Git and Bash (if you're using a programmer and have the freedom to choose the SCM you use then the former should be true; if you're a Mac OS X user then the latter is true by...

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Posted by wincent at 9:00 AM