<p>I grew up as a software developer on a steady diet of Dr Dobb’s magazines. I was hooked the first time I came across an issue of the magazine as a student in the university library and for most of my career I have been a subscriber to it, until the print magazine was cancelled. I was sad to read this morning that after 38 years of publication, first in print and then on the web, the online edition has now <a…
<p>In a <a href="https://www.lonecpluspluscoder.com/2014/03/12/improving-the-performance-of-git-for-windows/" title="Improving the performance of Git for Windows">previous blog post</a> I explained how you can substantially improve the performance of git on Windows updating the underlying SSH implementation. This performance improvement is very worthwhile in a standard Unix-style git setup where access to the git repository is done using ssh as the transport layer. For a regular development…
<p>The default setup for the <a href="http://mercurial.selenic.com/">Mercurial</a> DVCS on Windows with <a href="http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.org/">tortoisehg</a> uses <a href="http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.63/htmldoc/Chapter7.html#plink">plink</a> and <a href="http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/0.63/htmldoc/Chapter9.html#pageant">Pageant</a> to manage SSH keys when you are using ssh as the transport protocol for mercurial. That’s most likely the right choice for a normal Windows…
<p>… I’ll just point them to <a href="http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2014/10/grumpy-people-get-the-details-right.html?mid=facebook_nymag">this article</a> and explain that I’m just sweating the details. If you’re a programmer, that is a lot more important than most people and most programmers would believe.</p>
<p>Quick hack/warning for those using an alternative command line processor like <a href="https://jpsoft.com/tccle-cmd-replacement.html">TCC</a> and also use Xoreax’ <a href="https://www.incredibuild.com/">Incredibuild</a> for distributed builds. Incredibuild is awesome, by the way, and if you have a larger C++ project that takes a long time to build, you should use it. And no, I’m not getting paid or receive free stuff for writing that.</p>
<p>Interesting story how a development team at Facebook <a href="https://code.facebook.com/posts/313033472212144/debugging-file-corruption-on-ios/">debugged a resource handling issue</a> in their iOS app.</p>
<p><a href="http://blog.regehr.org/archives/199">A</a> <a href="http://blog.regehr.org/archives/208">couple</a> of interesting articles about debugging. Debugging doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention when people are taught about programming, I assume you’re supposed to acquire this skill by osmosis, but it is actually one of those skills that should receive much greater attention because it’s one of those that separates highly productive developers from, well, not so…
<p>OK, I admit it - I’m a dinosaur. I still use the command line a lot as I’m subscribing to the belief that I can often type faster than I can move my hand off the keyboard to the mouse, click, and move my hand back. Plus, I grew up in an era when the command line was what you got when you turned on the computer, and Windows 2.0 or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Environment_Manager">GEM</a> was a big improvement.</p>
<p>First, a confession - I actually occasionally call myself a coder, but in a tongue in cheek, post-modern and ironic way. Heck, it does make for a good blog title and license plate.</p>
<p>Like pretty much every other programmer with a Mac, I’m currently looking at <a href="https://developer.apple.com/swift/">Swift</a>. Will I write anything but toy programs in it? I don’t know yet - I don’t really write any Mac-ish software on my Mac, just unix-ish programs. If Swift doesn’t escape the OS X and iOS ecosystems it’ll be a nice exercise in a neat language that’s not really that relevant to the world at large, or at least to my part of the…
