Coda & Espresso
Mac Dev Tools Worth Having
For a lot of people, the Mac is seen as the PC for a “creative person”. Very “artsy.” Now, I’ve spent years (decades) developing code on Sun workstations, DEC equipment, and PC’s – the Mac, and the tools that are available on it beat all that stuff by a wide margin.
For starters, Mac OS…
Social Networks 2.0
A question was recently posted on Linked In about the future of Social Networks. And not a week goes by when someone doesn’t ask me about building on of these behemoths. It’s hip, it’s trendy, and “everyone uses FaceBook or MySpace.” Lets ignore the business aspects of this for a moment – which drives much of the interest, anyway – and…
Engine Yard – Rails Hosting Nirvana
Most of my daylight hours are spent as CTO/lead-coder/graphics-monkey of a start-up I’ve been with for a couple of years: Dialed In. This is a Ruby On Rails application and that means we hit the usual problem with Rails of finding a good hosting service. There aren’t a whole lot of top-shelf options in this…
Chrome
The new Google Chrome browser is a really nice piece of technology. Google has an uncanny knack for building applications which are fast, light, and smart. The search/address field is a very well done. Type whatever you want in there and get a list of likely matches. If nothing fits, hit return and go search for it. When you start using…
ShoveBox
If you’re doing code development on a Mac, especially if you’re bouncing onto your web server a lot, there are a lot of little commands and passwords that you need to keep track of. SSH passwords, SVN passwords and accounts, commands for SVN, Rails, Apache, mysql, etc. This is on top of the snippets of text for running the Mac itself and all the…
Treatment-Programs.com Launched
This week we launched the latest follow-on to find-a-therapist.com: treatment-programs.com.
This was an 80% rewrite of the old code-base. Some thought was given to going to a full-fledge PHP framework stack, but instead we opted to keep things light and simple. The Smarty template engine was used to handle the “V” side of an MVC application.…
WordPress Conversion Underway
WordPress 2.5 2.6 was released this week and it was so nice that I decided it was worth converting my old Joomla installation over to WordPress for the main Silicon Chisel site. Another incentive is that my personal blog is also in WordPress – as well as a few other sites I manage, so it just generally eases the maintenance load.
The…
Macintosh: The Underdog Strikes Back
Many years ago I was a heavy Mac user, as well as a Mac developer. Then I was more or less forced to adopt the Windows PC – partly for economic reason, partly because I entered the PC game industry.
Recently, though, I acquired a MacBook Pro and am loving it. Not just for the fun of using a Mac again, but also for…
