Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Using Homebrew

I’ve been using the mac long enough that I’ve gone through several of the package management systems for installing additional open source tools. I started off with Fink which I really liked since it was based on dpkg. Then it became clear that the community had switched to using Mac Ports (formerly Darwin Ports). I was a bit disappointed with this because the package management wasn’t as good as it was with Fink, but it kept pace with the newer OSs better than Fink.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, July 12, 2014

Swift First Impressions

So, for those developers living under a rock for the past 2 weeks, Apple introduced their new programming language Swift. They stated that the language has been in development for 4 years, so it is safe to assume that the language’s definition is fairly stable. Since I wrote several posts on what Objective C can learn from java, such as this most recent one, along with what it has learned, I should at least look at Swift.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, June 14, 2014

Disabling Nvidia

I have a MacBook Pro made in 2010 which is among the models which received faulty Nvidia chips. After this was discovered, Apple decided to extend the warrantee for the chips to 3 years. Instead of proactively replacing the faulty chips, they required that the machine exhibit the problem before they would consider replacement. So, like clockwork, my computer’s Nvidia chip fails after the 3 years. It results in kernel panics in the GPU driver about once a week.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, November 23, 2013

Mobile Passwords

Lately there have been several Ars articles discussing passwords and online security. In today’s world, people generally use passwords which are completely inadequate for securing anything, much less private or financial data. Additionally, the “tricks” people are taught on securing their passwords are the wrong lessons (cue obligatory xkcd). So, one of the best solutions is to use a password management system, such as 1Password or LastPass. This solves the problem of weak passwords and the memorization factor, but that still leaves the creation of a strong password for the password manager.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Wednesday, June 12, 2013

A Month with AppCode

Anyone who uses multiple IDEs along with Xcode recognizes just how far behind Xcode is compared to others. I would even go as far as to argue it is at least half a decade behind Eclipse. Features which I have long grown use to having are completely absent in Xcode. Then, about a month ago, I discovered AppCode and started using it for my Obj-C development at work. I could repeat the feature set mentioned on their website, but instead I’ll assume you’ve read that and outline the crucial parts.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Monday, April 29, 2013