Developer Coach

Scribd is a great service, offering PDF downloads of a variety of content.  Unfortunately there is an ugly 8 digit (random?) number prefixed on each file downloaded. 47432750-Book-Name-Whatever.pdf 47501680-Another-Book-Name.pdf 47502885-Yet-Another-Book-Name.pdf It’s not descriptive, and it makes alphabetic sorting of the files downloaded impossible.  Here’s a small BASH shell script that will remove the first 9 characters (8 digits and the – character) from all…

One of the great features of the iPhone is the ability to load PDF files into the iBooks application… why lug paper around when you can have a huge amount of reading material right on your phone? One of the challenges of this is that many freely available materials come as 1 chapter per PDF file: Linux Device Drivers is just one example.  The…

Turnkey Linux offers a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) appliance – an ISO or VM to install or create a pre-configured Linux based web server.  The install is very streamlined offering minimal bloat, as well as many other advantages: pre-installed and configured applications, text GUI configuration on initial boot, configured for automatic updates, based on a Long Term Support (LTS) version of Ubuntu.  However,…

About git Git is a distributed version control system that is easy to use and free.  I will describe the use of git with Xcode on Mac OS X for iPhone development.  Because git is distributed, each client has a full copy of the repository.  This results in great performance in most situations involving the management of source code files. Installation A disk image…

Jeff Atwood has declared December 14th, 2009 as International Backup Awareness Day, and with good reason, as his blog, Coding Horror, experienced catastrophic data loss.  Long story short, a disk drive failure on a external hosting server resulted in complete data loss and a recent full backup was not available.  A lengthy, manual restore procedure is under way. Lesson learned: Jeff suggests maintaining your…

Mac OS X contains the handy at command for scheduling commands to run at a later time.  at is used to schedule the commands, and the atrun utility is used to execute the jobs.  However, by default the atrun utility isn’t enabled, any jobs scheduled via at will never run, with no particular warning.  The reason given in the man page for atrun is…