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Firefox 3.0b3. Sexy.

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:36:00 GMT

In spite of my previous rant, I'm not prepared to give up Firefox just yet - even in the face of blazing speed increases from the Safari camp. Now the Firefox team has given me one less reason to switch (albeit a superficial one). The new beta3 release is gorgeous, borrowing heavily (it's homage, right?) from the Safari UI, it seems to me.

I've only had it installed for a few minutes so I can't speak to any other improvements, but I like the look (a lot) and they appear to have fixed a bug that prevented me from editing blog posts in the beta2 version.

Leaving Firefox Behind

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 03:00:00 GMT

I keep trying to leave Firefox behind. And trying. And trying. Not behind, behind like feathered hair or roadkill, but behind as in dropping it as my primary browser. I haven't had much luck so far and it's pissing me off just a little bit. This I tell you this now because I just installed 3.0 b2 on my Mac hoping it would be better than 2.x and my bitterness is a bit more acute at the moment. Needless to say, it's not better. Not really, anyway. It doesn't even look that much better. I may even prefer the look of 2.x with one of Aronnax's outstanding grApple themes applied, to be honest.

SuperDuper 2.5 (Finally) Released

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 21:25:00 GMT

I've been looking forward to this for a long time now. SuperDuper, of course, is the outstanding backup software for Macs and this release offers compatibility with OS X Leopard. It's not free, sadly, but it's one of those apps that is far enough ahead of its free counterparts that I believe it's worth paying for. Yeah, I know Leopard ships with TimeMachine. Wonderful. Fantastic. Not good enough. Doesn't work for me.

I don't mean that it literally doesn't work for me. It probably functions just fine. My problem with it is that TimeMachine forces me to park a big ol' external hard drive on my desk and hard-wire it to my machine.

Fail Now, Fail Loud, Fail Proud

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 21:53:00 GMT

I write less code than I used to (particularly during the daylight hours), but I inherit a lot of code and I review a lot of code in addition to that which I still write. Today I read something that reminded me to write about a trend - or maybe it's an oversight - I've noticed in the last few years. It seems that a lot of developers are afraid of errors. Somewhere, somehow, it seems like it became the norm to create "bug-free" software by masking bugs and failing silently. Why? Or, more assertively...stop that.

Contrary to popular belief, errors are user-friendly (at least in the long run). Errors are certainly developer-friendly. In almost every case, the latter begets the former, I've found.

Don't Break the Web

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:49:00 GMT

In light of Microsoft's plans (or is it just a proposal?) for browser version targeting, I decided to weigh-in on a more philosophical level. There are a lot of very smart people chiming in on this who are much closer to the situation than I am at a practical level. They are better equipped to speak to any implementation concerns. My concern rests at a higher (as in more abstract, not better) level.

Attractive Accessibility

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 01:10:00 GMT

Generally speaking, I do everything I can to avoid images in content. Simple text is easier, more maintainable, more accessible and, for added incentive, I'm a spectacularly inept designer. Predictably, though, there's always an exception. When an exception arises and I have to use an image, I still want the markup to be semantic and accessible.

The technique I use isn't revolutionary or even new, but I don't see it used very much where I work, so I thought I'd write it down. Who knows? Maybe it's less common than I've been assuming it is.

Ant for Web Applications

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 22:56:00 GMT

On the whole, I suppose, Ant is probably best known as a build automation tool for "traditional" software projects (particularly Java), but its usefulness for building and deploying web applications should not be dismissed. I've been using Ant since maybe 2003 or 2004 to do just that.

This entry offers a high-level view of how I use Ant to meet my own build and deployment needs. Subsequent posts will look at specific elements that are non-standard or that relate to how I integrate Ant into my end-to-end deployment process.

Variable Replacement with Ant

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 01:31:00 GMT

In the years I've been using Ant, there aren't many things I haven't been able to make it do for me to automate the end-to-end build and/or deployment process. There is at least one thing that's eluded me, though. Automated changes to a config file.

On Nomenclature in Code

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 22:05:00 GMT

Among the (many) things that I'm admittedly anal about with respect to code is nomenclature. I hate obfuscation, I detest ambiguity, I deplore obscure abbreviations. I'm also not a fan of misdirection.

Principles of Web Application Development

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 23:48:00 GMT

Anyone that's been building web applications (or doing anything else, for that matter) for any length of time has undoubtedly established a few operating principles that drive the way they work and the deliverables they produce. I have mine. Not too long ago, I sat down and made an effort to articulate the principles (well, at least the big ones) that drive my work and, after some thought, decided to publish them here. I'd be interested in hearing how others apply (or avoid) the principles that I follow.

Keep It Simple, Stupid
Separate Presentation from Content
Separate Content from Behavior
Prefer Extensibility to Performance
Prefer Readability to Perforance
Prefer Simplicity to Flexibility
Less First, Then More

MAMP 1.7.1: Problem(s) Solved

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 01:46:00 GMT

After all of my bitching and moaning about how MAMP was affecting (read: preventing) my full development workflow, last night I downloaded v1.7.1 - I've been running 1.7.0. I knew 1.7.1 had been released recently and it was on my "short" list of things to do, but yesterday I did it to see if it would automagically fix all my problems. Sho'nuff...it did.

Most Commonly Installed Fonts

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 21:44:00 GMT

I'm not a designer (quite). I don't play one on TV. When it comes to typography for my sites - unless I have a designer screaming for something else - I stick to the tried and true font-family value in my CSS: Verdana, Arial, Geneva, Helvetica, sans-serif. Good 'nuff, on to better things. Today, though, I decided to do the dance so I had to see which fonts are cross-platform enough and whose operating system install base is significant enough that I can use them with a reasonable degree of comfort.

CodeStyle provided the answers I needed. Good stuff.

PHP, Meet ColdFusion

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 17:03:00 GMT

Caught this post on one of the PHP feed aggregators: 10 PHP Myths Dispelled. Any of these ring familiar to any ColdFusion Developers out there?

MAMP + Svn Woes

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 18:37:00 GMT

Reckon I just might've spoke too soon when I posted last night. Maybe. I thought I'd solved all of my issues with MAMP and had successfully bent it to my will when I got pear running. Alas, 'twould appear not. Today I tried to execute an Ant script and one of my Subversion tasks was failing.

MAMP + PEAR + tcsh

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 00:59:00 GMT

Having chosen MAMP as my Apache, MySQL & PHP stack of choice on the Mac, things have been rolling along pretty well. Well, until tonight. Tonight was the first time I've had a need to connect to a database since I started developing locally. I've been building out the domain model of a project for the past few weeks and now it's time to establish persistence. Since I've used PEAR::MDB2 for database abstraction in the past and am reasonably comfortable with doing so, I decided to just stick with it (one of these days I'll get around to trying out PHP's baked-in data objects). Using MDB2, though, means that I need a working installation of pear. MAMP comes with pear installed, but it's not necessarily configured and happily ready to run. Mine most certainly wasn't.

Safari Screams

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 23:43:00 GMT

I've been thinking about making the move to Safari as my primary browser for day-to-day browsing for a while now. Please note my use of the word "thinking". That's key. I never actually did it. At least not until this week. Before embarking on a holiday vacation to the tropical utopia of northwest Ohio from which I hail, I made a pact with myself to use Safari instead of Firefox for all of my non-development browsing activities. Well, save for Gmail because, frankly, I can't live without the Gmail Macros script for Greasemonkey. Armed with these good intentions and the inevitable exception to the rule, I donned my snow tires and ventured north and west for a week of family, yuletide mirth and Firefox-less browsing.

The results of my (frighteningly) unscientific experiment? Safari freaking screams. Holy crap, it's fast. Really fast.

I didn't do any benchmarking or perform any kind of useful quantitative analysis to validate my observations (I mentioned that this was an unscientific analysis, right?); I'm just going to ask you to trust me on this one. I was impressed. I decided about 3 days in that Safari was now going to be my browser o' choice when frolicking about the Internet.

Now I just need to figure out how to get Quicksilver (link to Wikipedia because quicksilver.blacktree.com appears to be down) to open my Gmail bookmark in Firefox and everything else in Safari. Surely that can be done. Um, right?

Rockin' the Keyboard: Open the Task Manager

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 21:29:00 GMT

I can't count the number of times Windows has frozen up on me and prevented me from accessing the Start Menu to restart. I just found out that there is another way. Press Ctrl+Shift+Esc to open the Windows Task Manager. From there, choose Shut Down > Restart to avoid a hard reboot. I suspect this will come in handy...

Engineering an Effective Stylesheet

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 18:16:00 GMT

In the course of catching up on some (very) neglected reading, I ran across a fantastic article by Jina Bolton about how to engineer a stylesheet. Well, her title is Creating Sexy Stylesheets, but I don't like that title. That might be the only think I don't like about the article. In my mind, the title itself is too whimsical - or maybe titillating - and masks the importance of what she's espousing. In the article, she ticks off ten tips for engineering a, um, sexy stylesheet. I really like and agree with what she's saying, but thought I'd add a few of my own thoughts to what she's offering.

01. Keep CSS out of the markup.

Oh, dear God, yes. Yes, yes, yes. For exactly the reasons she gives, yes. If you're serious about this web design|development stuff, treat this as a commandment. This is not optional or discretionary in any way.

02. Semantics is not just a buzz word.

See my response to item 01. Double it. Multiple the product by a factor of 27.

04. Know when to use conditional comments or hacks.

Better yet, don't use them. The hacks, I mean, not the conditional comments. If you must use them (and dammit, we all know we must from time to time), though, at least sequester them in the isolation ward of an IE-only style sheet. Today it's one small(-ish) hack, tomorrow it's 19. If you're working in a team of 3-5 people all updating stylesheets it'll be more like 52. Accept - and learn to love - the small inefficiency you're going to introduce. It won't hurt much now and over the life of your style sheet, you'll be much happier, I think.

05. Organizing selectors and declarations.

I organize my stylesheets a little differently. I tend to organize my selectors according to the markup so I can nicely indent descendant selectors. Organizing things that way helps me more clearly draw the mental map between my markup and my styles.

My declarations, I choose to order alphabetically. I've known the alphabet since I was, like, 5 and it hasn't changed even a little bit in all that time. Organizing the way Jina does is just too confusing for my tastes. I can never remember the "proper" grouping of declarations and any "personalized" grouping of declarations just seems - and is - too arbitrary for my tastes.

The alphabet is, in my experience, reasonably stable and accessible. It's even got a nice little melody, if I get confused about whether "J" comes before "L". I think I'll just stick to that for now.

07. Balance readability and optimization.

Agree completely. But err on the side of readability. Assuming your site or application is going to evolve over a span of time measured in months or years rather than minutes and you're not working in some insane, performance-is-everything shop, prefer readability over performance. Certainly there's a balance, but never lose sight of the fact that readability is the key to cheap, timely and easy maintenance.

About Tips 03, 06, 08, 09 & 10

Everything else she writes is, as my grandmother used to say, just good sense and I agree with it just the right amount. Which is to say, I disagree with nothing and have nothing to add.

All in all, a great article that's well worth a read.

.Mac Sync?

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 23:36:00 GMT

Yep, I'm still learning how to use a Mac.

Tonight, after installing the 10.5.1 update, I noticed an icon in my menu bar that I'd never seen before. Being naturally inquisitive, I clicked it. The Kremlin wasn't notified, nor was global thermonuclear war initiated, but it turned out to be some .Mac syncing utility. I've never used .Mac. I don't have an account with .Mac. Truth be told, I don't really know all that much about .Mac at all; I've never needed it. I spent a fleeting moment being somewhat miffed before semi-logically deciding that it must have been my upgrade that installed it. It was kind of annoying to have it just show up, but no worries, I thought, I'll just remove it.

The way I usually (now read: used to) manipulate menu bar icons is to open the preferences panel and tell the application not to appear on my menu bar. Easy. Except that no such option was available for .Mac Sync. As I started getting more irritated by its presence and my seeming lack of ability to remove it, I decided to try something really simple, stupid and just drag it off. Poof! The icon disappeared into Apple's familiar little puff of smoke.

Nice.

Running MAMP Installed Services Without MAMP

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 01:20:00 GMT

Tonight, I walked in the door from work to this email from John:

Greetings. I read your post on running MAMP with virtual hosts, which was the same thing I did.

Now MAMP annoys me by prompting me for my credentials each time it launches, since 80 is a low port.

After reading your blog, I thought you'd be the kind of person whom that would annoy, too, and you would have already come up with a nifty startup thingy to get around it. I thought I would just request that you send it to me whilst I continue to bask here in my laziness.

Well, I hadn't come up with any such a "nifty startup thingy", but John's email amused me (by sounding remarkably similar to something I might say) so I thought I'd look into it. I have MAMP in my login items so I got this same request for authorization every time I logged in, but I restart so seldom that I never really gave it much thought. It was just part of my startup process. My MAMP-related login flow goes like this: Login -> Authenticate to start the MAMP servers -> Quit MAMP (leaving the services themselves running). Now that John mentioned it, that was annoying. And now that it was on my mind, my annoyance would only grow. Thanks for that, John. :-)

So I started looking for a solution. To solve the problem to my satisfaction, I needed to solve John's problem and then some. Here's what I was after:

I wanted to avoid the post-login credential validation.
I wanted the services - Apache and MySQL - to start when I booted up.
I did not want the MAMP application to start when I booted up (I mean, hell, the first thing I did was quit it).

Like any good Unix geek (or wannabe geek), I cracked open the terminal and found the first part of the solution. Although stopping and starting Apache and MySQL from the command line are both fairly trivial tasks, MAMP ships with a handy shell script aptly named start.sh. Guess what it does? It calls startApache.sh and startMysql.sh. Surprise. I love when developers make it easy to work with their software. After making sure that both servers were stopped, I executed the script:

$ sudo ./start.sh

Apache started fine, but MySQL wouldn't start. Seems that since I installed MAMP as myself a few critical files were owned by me rather than by the system and that prevented sudo from doing what I needed with them. To fix that, I modified the ownership of two directories:

$ sudo chown -R mysql:admin /Applications/MAMP/db/mysql
$ sudo chown -R mysql:admin /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql

Both statements grant ownership of the respective directories to the mysql user. It should come as no great shock that this is the user that the MySQL server runs as rather than running as me or some other arbitrary user. The first directory is the location of all of the database files and the second is a temporary file location to which MySQL needs to write from time to time. Once these changes were made the start script ran as expected and both services started successfully.

The second part of that problem was to make the machine run that script at startup. I guess I could have created an Automator application that executed the script and put the application in my login items, but that seemed too hacky for my tastes. I like elegance. Besides, that would only start the servers when I login. I kind of wanted them to just start, you know, independent of me. There may be other ways, but I chose to create a .plist file and save it in /Library/LaunchDaemons. I created /Library/LaunchDaemons/info.mamp.servers.plist with the following content:

   Label
   info.mamp.servers
   ProgramArguments

       /Applications/MAMP/bin/start.sh

   RunAtLoad

   ServiceDescription
   This plist starts the Apache and MySQL servers that are shipped with MAMP

I rebooted and, with a kindly tip-o'-the-hat to Emeril, BAM! I had services with no MAMP.

I honestly don't know whether the secondary authentication when MAMP starts is caused by the low port number (80) that I use as John suggests or whether it has something to do with the permissions as they existed before I changed them or something else entirely. All I know is that now that I'm not starting MAMP every time I login, I don't get the login box. All three problems solved...even if I don't know exactly why one was a problem to begin with.