Okay, first things first: I wrote this article on August 25th. That’s important.1
Now the disclaimer: I woke up on August 26th and found out that I won an iPad from Hover.
Now the clarity: I don’t get paid to blog. I’ve never been shy about writing articles about software and expecting nothing in return. I’ve written posts about desktop software such as Scrivener, web apps such as Posterous, and even web-based “service-like” companies such as Iterasi. I’ve even written about how amazing the Microsoft Visual Studio system is… and I freakin’ …

This is mostly a post for my memory and to aid the searches.
Say you’re building an Android application using Eclipse, and you screw up your XML file, and then you FIX your XML file and try to run your app, but get an error window with Eclipse telling you that you have an error in your application and that it can’t launch and that you should check your console.
But there’s nothing in the console, and you have no errors.
Look in your Problems window and you’ll probably see an error that …

I took a trip to Portland recently to traipse through OSCON. I was mostly in the exhibition hall with all the great schwag and company booths– many which had posted job announcements. While there, I was once again frustrated by a trend I keep seeing. The trend can be described as an “arms race of job announcements,” and has gotten to the point where it’s difficult to find a development job listed by a company that is not seeking a “ninja,” or a “rockstar,” or some similarly absurdly described candidate.
Smart …

It looks like the folks on the Twitter API team have built their own URL shortener and will soon wrap all URLs to protect against fishing and collect stats:
Additionally, as we mentioned at our Chirp developer conference in April, if you want to share a link through Twitter, there currently isn’t a way to automatically shorten it and we want to fix this. It should be easy for people to share shortened links from the Tweet box on Twitter.com.
To meet both of these goals, we’re taking …

It’s pretty silly, and wasted more time than I needed to, but I’m really very incredibly “oh my god I’m so sick of this I could puke” bored with Lorem Ipsum text. You know what I’m talking about, that placeholder text you use when you just need to fill a paragraph with something, and don’t feel like typing shaesthstnsahoestha?
This:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi …

This post is mostly a whiny diatribe on how I’m a stupid idiot.
Mostly, when I code, I focus on logic: algorithms, object models and other back-end stuff. All the stuff that’s hard and doesn’t give any sort of gratification to the front-end developers or users because, well, it’s not on the front-end. The stuff I like to code are the elegant binary-keyed dictionary structures that route water in multiple simultaneous directions in a hydrologic model. It’s the stuff no-one sees.
Consequently, because I hate the design side,1 my apps generally look …

I’ve got an interesting question that I have no answers to yet:
How can I protect Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) development while working as a contract programmer?
Specifically, how can I promote the development of small libraries like Ruby Gems and make sure that it is both understood, accepted, and most of all legal?
Using Free Stuff, Is It “Take” Only?
I’m not talking about stealing intellectual property from a client and throwing a GPL on it, of course. But there’s an interesting responsibility that I feel when I program. It comes …

We don’t tend to take ourselves too seriously here in The Gorge. We’ve got some great stuff going on, and a lot of that is pretty awesome tech. Still, we know that we’re small time, and we’re alright with that. Most of us who’ve grown up here haven’t left for a reason, and the rest of us who moved here have done so for a reason.
We’re not “big city lights.” We don’t have all the options of flashy Hollywood-like Portland.
We’re tiny. We’re quaint.
But quaint has it’s advantages. One of those …

I had an interesting experience yesterday that illustrated to me the danger of building Twitter-based web applications without seriously considering the consequences of what you are doing. It was a perfect low-consequence wake-up call on the incredible responsibility web application programmers have.
It was basically a case of my Twitter stream being SPAMmed by an application that I didn’t know existed and don’t really care about. This is pretty important to me since I’m developing the “for fun” side project Tweetscore, which might have some day done the same thing.

I wanted to learn Ruby, and I like doing things right, and doing them as a team, so I started a local Ruby Users Group!