Marco Arment posted this graph today, which shows some relative sales numbers of what he calls "obscure game consoles" (which presumably just means those outside the Microsoft/Sony/Sega/Nintendo dominion) right up against tablets which aren't the iPad.…
OS X Lion has made signing PDFs easier than ever before. It's been possible to scan in your handwritten signature and sign documents in earlier versions of Mac OS X, but it was a complex process and one most people probably never trifled with. More often…
Why pay Apple $69.99 when you can build your own Lion install drive for the App Store purchase price of $29.99 -- plus the cost of an inexpensive thumb drive. Here's how to create a full install on a drive, not just the recovery disk that we recently…
Today we have a guest post by James Long (@jlongster). James is the tech lead for mozilla.com on the Web Development team. James is passionate about interactive graphics on the open web. Today he explains how you can create 3D objects using CSS without…
A while ago I started a series of posts showing benchmark results on Amazon EC2 servers with RAID’ed EBS volumes and MySQL, versus RDS machines. For reasons that won’t add anything to this discussion, I got sidetracked, and then time passed, and I no…
Here are a few things I’ve been doing lately to write better code, and less code, with less effort. SYNTHESIZED INSTANCE VARIABLES Adding a property is costly when you have to declare it three times: once as an instance variable, once (or twice) as a…
The more drums we have in our kit, the more jobs we can handle.
Lucas123 writes "eBay's QA division was facing mounting performance issues related to its exponential growth of virtual servers, so instead of purchasing more 15k rpm Fibre Channel drives, the company began migrating over to a pure SSD environment. eBay…
When the AJAX wave came in 2005 when Jesse James Garrett coined the term and then everyone wanted it, one of the major shortcomings was that dynamic updates of only portions of a web page lead to inconsistent history handling and back/forward navigation…
I’ve been thinking a bunch about platforms lately, and how they’re evolving very very quickly. Generally, there are two categories of thing that people talk about as platforms. Traditionally, they’ve been computer operating systems: Windows, OS X & Linux,…
DeviceGuru writes "DeviceGuru's 10-inch tablet smackdown pits Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1 against Apple's iPad 2. At price parity the iPad 2 is probably a better bet for the average user since it's a more stable, near-perfect device with a rich assortment…
(this is cross-post from https://www.percona.com/blog/) While PCI-e Flash cards show great performance, I am often asked about alternatives, as price for PCI-e cards is still significant and not acceptable for small companies and startups. Intel 320 SSD…
What should start from /etc/rcS.d/ in Debian? - almost nothing In the Debian boot system, several packages include scripts that are started from /etc/rcS.d/. In fact, there is a bite more of them than make sense, and this causes a few problems. What…
Day 3. Let's get geek! Dashboard 3: Star Wars! The first time I showed it to the team internally most of them said "There's no such Jedi!" in a very offended way! Bottom line, we did it cause we wanted to! It really shows that BI doesn't always…
As you acquire more and more music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, apps, and books, it becomes increasingly difficult -- or, more likely, impossible -- to fit your entire iTunes library on your iPod, iPhone, or iPad. Kirk McElhearn offers some advice on how…
Entering accented characters while using *any* keyboard layout is easier than ever, similar to using iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Previously, to enter letters like é, ñ, ö, you had to learn one of several hints: option-key combinations, use the…
One common theme in the questions our MySQL Support customers ask is MySQL Replication Lag. The story is typically along the lines everything is same as before and for some unknown reason the slave is started to lag and not catching up any more. I always…
The H reports on the introduction of UnQL (UNstructured Query Language, pronounced "Uncle"), which is meant to be the SQL of the NoSQL movement. "CouchDB creator Damien Katz and SQLite creator Richard Hipp have been working on UnQL to create a higher…
The first part of this blog post is here. I’ve initially split it in two parts because I’ve encountered a few problems with the distributed feature, so I thought it was going to take Ben a few days to fix them. But he did fix them within the hour…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, The rapid pace of change in the world of iOS development means that it is easy for old projects (which is just about anything more than about 6 months old) to get left behind. Each time a…
You can use your logs as a "poor mans" honey pot. Review your logs and modify the following awk command to suit your needs. The exact syntax will vary depending on your authentication (passwords or keys) and server. Debian: awk…
Tilt is cool. Very cool. But I almost see it as a debugging tool and I wish the links were clickable, Firebug or DOMI could work. So I did what I always do in such a case, what I did long ago with Small Screen Rendering: I used CSS It's less powerful since…
snydeq writes "InfoWorld takes a look at the rise of Git, the use of which has increased sixfold in the past three years. Buoyed in large part by interest among the Ruby community and younger developers, Git has been gaining share for open source…
I got a serendipitous call (thanks!) yesterday asking what would be needed to tune[1] a database for better performance. It is a question that I hear often, but I never thought about answering it in public. Here’s a consolidated version of what I…
The latest news from Google on open source releases, major projects, events, and student outreach programs.
Today, Steve Sande begged me to add a full-screen button to Colloquy. He offered me chocolate and kittens, neither of which is particularly good for me. But he's a good guy and I like him and his wife so I went ahead and figured this out. [Editor's note:…
Whenever I launch Skype on my computer, it gets banned from the university network within a few minutes; the ban expires again after a few minutes when I close Skype. This is likely due to the aggresive nature of Skype, maybe the firewalls think it is…
Finding large space hogging files in a complex file system like that on your Mac can be difficult. GrandPerspective, a small open source program, aims to help you find and remove space wasters quickly and easily. GrandPerspective first scans a target…
Less Talk, More Do Christopher Finke writes about things he has done: software, woodworking, and other creative endeavors. What do people type in the address bar? Update: URL Fixer was acquired and is now hosted at http://urlfixer.org/ Earlier this…
The latest news from Google on open source releases, major projects, events, and student outreach programs.
1Password version 3 was recently made available with Mac OS X Lion compatibility, enhanced keyboard shortcuts and, most notably for Safari users, a new Safari extension. The new extension borrows heavily from its Chrome counterpart and represents a…
Launchpad in Mac OS Lion shares a key behavior with its iOS counterpart: deleting an app from the launcher also uninstalls it from the computer, as long as the app was purchased from the Mac App Store. Of course, it's quick and easy to redownload the MAS…
To increase the speed of communication in the free software community, many people use acronyms. However you might sometimes find one you aren't sure of it's meaning. So here is a list of the most common ones. More can be found in the Jargon file. *…
Save time using your browser by learning these essential keyboard shortcuts for both Snow Leopard and Lion's Safari.
Update: The San Jose Mercury News got this one wrong and the info has been redacted in their original story. While Mr. Atkinson is a user, he's not a part of Google's team. Thanks to everyone who brought this to our attention and Mike Swift for the…
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Peter Wayner provides an overview of the more compelling NoSQL data stores on offer today in hopes of helping IT pros get started experimenting with these powerful tools. From Cassandra, to MongoDB, to Neo4J, each appears geared…
I will show you now, how to write a simple HTTPS JSON REST server using node.js components. Grab a beer, open your IDE and let’s start hacking. If you don’t have valid https certificates, you can generate one for testing purposes. If you need one cool…
Some Mac users prefer to do a "clean install" of each major new version of OS X, erasing their drive and starting over. We examine whether or not that's possible or, more important, advisable with Lion.
I am pursuing the RedBarrel experiment, mainly by writing some documentation to show how things work. If you don’t recall what I am talking about, read back the two previous blog entries: I added a full demo in the documentation, that explains how to…
At work, we've been moving all of our development processes to git. As part of that, I've encouraged that alphas, betas, and releases be tagged in git -- it's important to know which versions are in use where. Additionally, my director wanted archives…
The Mac OS X Lion release was widely anticipated for this week, but alas, it wasn't meant to be. Still, we have a guide on how to migrate to a new Mac with Lion without using Apple's Migration Assistant and discussed Apple's commitment to creative pros.…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, With the release of iOS 5 expected sometime in September is it time to drop support for 3.1.3 and only support 4.x and later? If so what version of iOS 4.x should you target as a minimum…
i386 systems are dying off and therefore building 32bit Debian packages in 64bit environments is important if you still need packages for i386. For some recent projects I had to set up 64bit-only environments with the need to provide 32bit packages for…
I’m going to write a series of posts on different career tracks in software engineering and design over the next few months. This is the first of ‘em, I don’t have a timeline for the rest but will get to them all in due course, and am happy to take…
Dear Dev Juice, We have a 3 man dev team with the iOS developer program (as a small company plan) and we are getting ready to move up to Xcode 4 once Lion is out to the public and the have a stable sdk. What is the best way to set all of our systems so we…
WankerWeasel writes "With the release of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion this month, Apple will no longer offer a bootable installer DVD and is making 10.7 Lion available only through the App Store. This guide provides quick instructions on how to use the OS X 10.7…
mdrejhon writes "Geeks who miss the UNIX 'talk' days, have a new modern savior: XMPP.org has published the new XEP-0301 Real-Time Text standard, which allows streaming text that is continuously transmitted as it is typed or otherwise composed. It allows…
Dear Dev Juice, How do you implement that slightly egotistical Apple logo hidden in iBooks.app if you drag the bookshelf down from the top? Brandon E. Dear Brandon Ah. You speak of the hidden drag-to-reveal logo. Actually, that's super-easy to do. Just…
Following the freemium lead of many game makers, Caspian software is making its game development software free. The software previously cost $5000
A while ago Google introduced an API Explorer for many of their APIs. In Mozilla Messaging we had done a similar api browser for Raindrop that James Burke created, which we ended up using in the early days of F1 as well. I’ve been meaning to make our api…
cardoni writes "Dan Yoder, CTO at Border Stylo, offers insights on the current state of simultaneous iPhone / Android development using PhoneGap and his thoughts on the debate over native apps versus Web apps. Quoting: 'One problem with the debate is that…
An anonymous reader writes "It's frustrating when you explore the web and encounter the famous message: 404 Error – Page Not Found. What could make it a little better is a customized 404 message. Here are some really good ones that should inspire other…
Hey—we've moved. Visit The Keyword for all the latest news and stories from Google Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture Starting today, you might begin noticing that things look a little different across Google…
I recently upgraded my virtual host node from Fedora 13 to Fedora 15 and alas virt-manager / NetworkManager do not yet configure a bridged network device for use with KVM guests. There have been some changes to how Fedora names network devices as well as…
This is cute. The iPad 2 display dock is a new product by a company called New PC Gadgets that's basically a dock for your iPad 2 that looks just like the ones holding the devices in Apple Stores. Sure, it'll hold your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad 2 with…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, Yesterday GitHub for Mac was announced by the good folks over at GitHub. This basically brings the Git repository management features from GitHub down into a standalone Mac application.…
Mozilla is a global non-profit organization that has one mission: to make the web better. The Mozilla web development team is hiring a number of passionate individuals to build web products that promote and support this mission. We’re looking for 2…
Dear Dev Juice, I'm having an issue with UIView animations, that I'm struggling to describe in keywords, so I can't find anything helpful with Google. The problem is that I can't seem to work out how to make a UIButton move relative to the bottom of the…
First I was just annoyed by Firefox's "your browser has been updated and must be restarted nagging banner": It slides in with an annoying animation with each tab you open. Even if you closed it. There is no "nag me not" button. GUYS! I'VE GOT WORK TO…
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Christopher Mims writes at MIT Technology Review that Mika Mobile, developer of Battleheart, a big hit on both the iOS and Android platforms, says that "a polished, high quality product is more likely to be embraced on Android…
The latest news from Google on open source releases, major projects, events, and student outreach programs.
Longtime Mac users are very familiar with Fetch Softworks. The company has been around since 1989, and is named after the classic Mac FTP client -- Fetch. Now Fetch Softworks has branched out with a new addition to the family named Roadshow. Roadshow…
Over the weekend, Hulu subtly updated its iOS application to comply with Apple's revised in-app subscription guidelines. As Mike Schramm posted earlier, it removed the link on its main sign-in page that allowed users to visit hulu.com/plus to sign up for…
Mobile ad company Flurry has released a new analysis on its official blog stating that customers are making the transition lately from using the mobile web to spending more of their daily time in mobile apps. In the early days of smartphone prominence…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, Now that WWDC is a fading memory (when will those videos of the sessions show up for those of us who could not go…) I wanted to comment on the two things I am most excited about with iOS 5.…
If you have some app that you always want to keep open -- in my case it's Stickies and DragThing, which I use frequently -- it's easy to set up the computer to do that for you. For example, to keep Stickies permanently open, remove Stickies from the login…
Facebook was apparently spurned by Apple in favor of Twitter for close integration in iOS 5, but the social networking giant is now moving ahead with plans to bypass the App Store with an upcoming HTML5 web app aimed at Mobile Safari -- Project Spartan.…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, 19 June 2013: The Twitter API v1 has now been discontinued meaning that the search URL used in this post will no longer work. I have updated the example code to use the new Social framework…
The book aims at helping Python developers create high quality 2D plots by using Matplotlib plotting library
The second iteration of the Native Linux KVM tool (a QEMU replacement for KVM) has been posted. The tool now has graphics support, SMP support, networking, file I/O said to be faster than QEMU, and more. The developers are now "officially aiming" to get…
On to Improving font size readability on Firefox for Android A few months ago, I wrote about landing support for CSS animations in Firefox. I want to say a little more about how CSS animations are useful. First, they make it easy for authors to write…
I have long wished for the ability to install a Debian system specifying both the package list and the exact versions of the packages installed. dpkg --get-selections | ssh newhost dpkg --set-selections is useful but always chooses the latest version, and…
With FontExplorer X Pro 3.0, Linotype significantly improved an already stellar font management utility.
(Disclaimer: I started working with RSS even before creating NetNewsWire nine years ago. I still very much want NetNewsWire to succeed. But know that I don’t speak for NetNewsWire or for its new owner, Black Pixel.) VARIETIES OF RSS When we talk about RSS,…
The latest news from Google on open source releases, major projects, events, and student outreach programs.
MancunianMaskMan writes "Sharks in the seas all around the world are interested in this story, though the less scientifically-minded will read the summary on the beeb web site about laser light produced by a living cell. The technique starts by…
CoryFoy writes "As someone who has been closely involved in both the 'agile software' movement as well as the 'Software Craftsmanship' movement, I have been following the work of Robert Martin for some time. So I was quite interested when I got my copy of…
{ No ducks were harmed in the making of this weblog. } I have been working for INRIA for one year now. I am still alive, though extremely busy… and it is high time to give a quick update. timesheets.js: I have been hired to develop a FLOSS, cross-browser…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, Update 07 April 2013: The threading considerations when using the shared NSFileManager instance changed with the introduction of iOS 5: The methods of the shared NSFileManager object can…
If you've been looking around for a solid VoIP/SIP client for the iPad or iPhone, consider CounterPath's Bria. For all the excitement around VoIP on the iPhone and iPod touch (including high profile apps like Skype, Vonage TalkFree for Facebook and…
After the success of my last test day I thought I would share some how I, and my fellow Mozillians, go about organising an event. For those who don't know what a test day, let me explain. A test day is a day where the Mozilla asks community members to help…
Given the popularity of utility programs that let you free up computer resources, it is worth noting that we can get the same effect free of charge using built-in system tools. The simple trick behind utilities that free up computer resources is the purge…
CSS 2.1 and CSS3 Color become W3C Recommendations – A Few Open Web Standards Practices Learned Developing good open web standards is more often than not an arduous, tedious, extremely detail oriented, and quite unglamorous task - it's work that typically…
dkd903 writes "According to proposals for Fedora 16, Btrfs will be the default filesystem used in that release. The proposal has been approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee. In Fedora 16, the switch from EXT4 to Btrfs will be a 'simple…
Hey—we've moved. Visit The Keyword for all the latest news and stories from Google Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture It’s been an exciting year in the display advertising business—the movement of media online…
ScuttleMonkey writes "Joel Spolsky sent out smoke signals this morning about the recent release of the Stack Exchange Website Profiler as open source. Sam Saffron expounds on why this profiler is perhaps 'best and most comprehensive production web page…
New versions of Anime Studio promise to make creating animations easier.
lee1 writes "Dhanji R. Prasanna, an engineer who recently resigned from Google, describes Google's famous back-end infrastructure as a collection of obsolete technologies, designed 10 years ago for building search engines and crawlers. He blasts MapReduce…
This hint is the result of an experience I tried in the last few days. It involves disabling the dynamic pager daemon and stop using virtual memory at all in Snow Leopard. I don't recommend doing it in previous OSX versions, or if don't want to take risks.…
Yesterday Apple announced their new internet service called iCloud. They finally have features which are essential for people who live in a connected world and have more than one device. I can't help myself but to compare this features with the stuff we…
After we linked to instructions for how to burn a Lion boot disc earlier this week, Nature's Eye Studios contacted MacStories to let them know they figured out how to get the new OS to boot off a SD card. After downloading Lion from the developer site,…
Skype has been in the news a lot lately: Microsoft agreed to buy the company, their network has gone down twice recently, and they're threatening to take unspecified action against developers who try to write free software to make calls on their system.…
aabelro writes "Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have decided to propose a common markup vocabulary, Schema.org, based on the Microdata format, simplifying the job of webmasters who want to give meaning to their web pages' content." Manu Sporny, chair of the…