TextMate to BBEdit switcher’s guide: BBEdit has command-t now! (well, sorta)

Posted on September 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

For the full details, see here:  https://groups.google.com/d/topic/bbedit/J5YUlmHsVvM/discussion

Now, this feature is wonderful if you’re a long-time BBEdit user. It’s pretty extra awesome if like me you can only run PeepOpen on some of your Macs. And, for switchers looking for a native way to replicate their beloved cmd-t, it’s not bad.

That said I can totally understand why switchers would say “Not the same, not what I want/need”. My dream was to see them re-use the same dialog as the “Insert Clipping” window, which is just like (or damn near, in any event) TextMate’s window. PeepOpen includes extra functionality like showing SCM status.

Still, you can bind it to cmd-t and it’ll work close enough that your muscle memory might not get too confused. And be sure to check out the even more recent betas; they’ve been doing some big performance improvements (one of the reasons I have always kept BBEdit in my Applications folder, even when I’m trying out another editor or using an IDE for stuff like Java).

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Fixing PHP: Perhaps more contributors is the solution

Posted on September 1, 2011 | Leave a comment

I had an alternate take on a point in this excellent post.

However, falling back on cavalier attitudes like the ones behind the statement “nothing is stopping you from contributing” is both insulting and counter-productive.

The alternate view is that lots and lots of things stop people from contributing to PHP: from a possibly daunting learning curve to lack of experience with a language engine to lack of C experience to the occasionally frosty nature of Internals.

It’s a pie-in-the-sky idea that will never happen, but if more of PHP was written in PHP, more people could contribute meaningfully; perhaps it would be easier to write tests, and fix problems.

Of course that potentially (if not probably) means re-writing the Zend Engine (think PyPy or Rubinius) and that’s just not going to happen, probably ever (for some unknown value of ‘ever’).

 

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Burned down, fell over, THEN sank into the swamp

Posted on August 30, 2011 | Leave a comment

So, a very long time ago, I had to write a very small cart app as an adjunct/add-on to a customer’s full store. The idea was, they’re going to sell a very select subset of products and they don’t want to do a huge install and pay for lots of new hardware and software. Make it run – and well – on the couple of spare boxes.

I did it in Rails but the performance was awful. So, as a side-project while I was working on optimizations, I re-built it from off-the-shelf PHP parts, and it was blazing fast. I used the bare minimum of parts – a simple router, a simple ORM, and my own dispatch/controller (that was conceptually stolen from Rails).

Like I said, it was a bare minimum app. It didn’t do a TON of things. As customers are want to do, they came back and asked, “Where are all the other things? The things it needs to do?”

“It doesn’t do those things”, I replied. “It says right here in the contract, ‘we aren’t going to do those things’, those things are to come later.”

Well, they were going to think about it, since we were going to charge money for those things. I started a little “plugin” thing to bide my time while they thought about it.

They thought about it and decided they didn’t want to pay for those things. Project cancelled.

Time passed and I had reason to pull out the codebase again. “Hey”, I said, “let’s implement some of those things to make it more attractive”. Before I could get an answer, this project was cancelled.

More time passed, and I began a huge “refactoring” of our existing product. It started off by folding in some bits from the tiny app, but eventually it became clear it needed to use a real, unified “stack” since getting all these disparate pieces together was actually more fragile than the ball-of-mud approach. So I abandoned it, yet again, and used the functionality provided by the framework we chose.

I was looking for some other file when I came across it in a directory called “misc” in a directory called “prototypes and saved things” in my project folder. So I put it up on Github.

It’s incredibly boring: it’s just a little PHP thing to let you hook into a “controller” (say, an MVC type thing) and call a set of defined thingees in an order you want. It’s a really, really dumb pre-and-post-dispatch type deal.

The story is far more interesting than the code.

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Safari 5.1 and “random reload”

Posted on August 29, 2011 | Leave a comment

So by now, you probably have an iPad. Right? There’s like, eleventy-billion of them sold so far, or something.

At some point you’ve probably been browsing around on the web, and then decided to play some Angry Birds, then back to web browsing. You open up Safari, and there’s the page you were reading; or at least there will be in a moment, because it just reloaded. Some times you can have a couple of “tabs” open, and visiting each in turn forces a page reload.

It’s incredibly annoying, but it makes sense: there’s precious little memory – real and virtual – and so some algorithm decides if a page should be kept in cache or flushed.

Well, Apple decided this was SO. INCREDIBLY. FUCKING. AWESOME. they decided to include it in Safari 5.1 for OS X. If I was using Lion to type this, I’d include the little shit icon/emoji.

Presumably this is some way to stop shitty JavaScripts from leaking and beachballing the entire OS. Or maybe they just thought it “just worked”.

Suffice it to say, many people aren’t happy. It’s finally gotten to me, having had a page reload in front of me while I was using it, with no other tabs open. That’s right: Safari had exactly 1 window with additional tabs and I got a page reload whilst flipping between my editor and the page o’ documentation.

Scuttlebutt is that disabling Java fixes it. I don’t know; in any event I have mission-critical services for work that require both Flash and Java, so I guess I am sort of screwed.

This brings up my eternal gripes with Firefox and Chrome: they annoy me to NO. END. As an example, I can’t get Chrome to set the icon in the Downloads folder, so whatever I last downloaded – disk image, picture, document, whatever – is the default white rectangle in my Dock. Always. That sort of makes the Downloads folder pointless (as a Dock item, anyway, in my humble but correct opinion). I tend to use it rather a lot, so having it not work is a giant poke in the eye.

There’s about 20 other things about Chrome I can’t seem to find an extension to correct. I honestly don’t see how people use it, on Mac OS X anyway, because it’s just covered in sharp edges. Is there anything more popular and yet, more warty and unpleasant?

Oh, right. Firefox. Don’t get me started: every time I open it, some extension is disabled for some reason or another. Now they’ve unveiled a plan to make that worse which is pretty great. I’ve only just figured out how to convince Firefox to stop grabbing the default client preference on my Mac – years after I’d decided Transmit was the best ever.

Anyway.

The point of this rant is that I’m pretty unhappy now with every browser out there. If I can’t find the switch for Safari’s “use the ungodly amounts of RAM I can buy cheaply” setting, what the hell do I do?

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Posted in Mac OS X

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So we had an earthquake…

Posted on August 24, 2011 | Leave a comment

7kDXs

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Some BBEdit goings on

Posted on August 14, 2011 | Leave a comment

Some cool stuff in BBEdit-land:

  • BLATANT SELF-PROMOTION: my own BBPackage (AFAIK the only on on the internets!) for better Zend Framework hacking. Now includes completion data and other stuff.
  • Clippings clippings! No longer must you look at page 259 of the manual! Also on Github.

I’ve got a few applescripts in progress, like one to emulate the Surround.vim plugin. I have a few big projects to wrap up at work, hopefully I can find the time to finish them.

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Let’s build an ecommerce web app, Part Two: 3 letters, 3 more, and then 3 more still

Posted on August 14, 2011 | Leave a comment

So! You’ve made it this far. What do you need to start thinking about? Probably what kind of bitchin’ language and framework you’re going to use, right?

No.

The first thing you need to think about is SSL.

So here’s the deal: totally really smart people often make the mistake of thinking about SSL. They get hyped up to use some big “cloud” thing and forget the golden rule of SSL:

No virtual hosting.

Hell you might even be saying right now, “Crap you’re right, I forgot about that!”.

It might not matter to you, though. In our experience, customers demand that the checkout process occur on their domain and not at storename.somecompany.com. Your mileage will vary. Bear in mind, though, that the two paradigms – hosted checkout versus integrated – will strongly affect all your future technical decisions (which is why we talk about it first).

There’s hope, though: SNI. The short answer to “what is SNI” is “SSL virtual hosts”.

The downside is everyone’s absolute favorite piece of technology, Internet Explorer 6, which doesn’t support SNI. Because IE6 ruled the roost for so long (hell we’re still waiting for it to go away), adoption of SNI has been … slow.

You could decide “screw IE6″ and start using SNI today; check the wiki article for all the stuff that does support it, it’s pretty comprehensive. You can make that call today.

In our experience, approximately 100% of the web-browsing public uses IE6. That’s not a joke: almost 100% of our customers are using IE6 on XP right now, and close to 100% of their customers are using IE6. Your mileage will almost certainly vary.

It’s the first big design decision in your app: do we support IE6 at all? Doing so will dictate a lot about front-end development (Javascript frameworks), and as I said, whether or not you want to deep-drive into SNI or stick with the tried-and-true SSL configuration (1 IP per host). Do you want to “funnel” your customers into a unified checkout or have virtual hosting with the checkout process on each host?

 

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