Category Archives: programming

New BBEdit Search and Replace Window

One of the new features of BBEdit 9 is the new Find/Replace Window, shown below:

BBEdit search and replace window

It's been simplified a lot since the last version, but the really big change is that it is now a modeless window. This means that the Find/Replace window can be left open whilst still allowing interaction with document windows. Initially, this seemed like a good feature to me before I realised a side-effect of this change: there are no keyboard shortcuts for the Find/Replace options anymore. You can see the difference by looking at the old Find/Replace window:

BBEdit search and replace window

In this example, the Command key is being held down to illustrate which shortcuts are available; for example, Command-G toggles the Grep support.

Because of the Modeless window, these shortcuts have been lost in BBEdit 9. This makes the Find/Replace window slightly more cumbersome to use as turning on search options now requires the mouse. Furthermore, the very useful Start At Top option, has been removed completely.

Update: Thanks to Rich Siegel, CEO of Bare Bones Software, who has pointed me towards the release notes which document some brand-new Find shortcuts, thus rendering this blog post mostly pointless. Hurrah!

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with more than 10 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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Singletons and global state

A very useful article from Google's Miško Hevery about the problems with the Singleton design pattern. Essentially, Singleton's rely on a global instance variable which could point to any number of other variables, thus creating a global state. This causes problems when you want to test your code.

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with more than 10 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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Software Development, Visualized

code_swarm is a fantastic application that visualises software projects over a period of time by analysing their code repositories. It aims to show in a graphical manner the users working on a project, and the number of files committed. Some great example videos are available, including a video of the Apache webserver project.

code_swarm

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with more than 10 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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Yahoo! Developer Network site redesign

Useful Javascript/PHP/Ruby resource, with lots of tutorials and code samples... now even prettier :)

Yahoo! Developer Network

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with more than 10 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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"Programmers Wikipedia" Coming Soon

stackoverflow.com is a new project from Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, intended to be "the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit". Worth keeping an eye on...

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with more than 10 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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Java fighting a losing battle

Interesting article from Zend co-founder Andi Gutmans on how the Java world is leveraging dynamic languages such as Ruby and PHP in order to remain relevant in the web application world. The obvious question is, though, whether using JRuby has enough advantages over using Ruby or PHP in a plain Linux environment without a JVM.

Today Sun is investing in JRuby Ruby and Jython Python support for its Java EE solution; the IBM Websphere group has realized the ineffectiveness of the Java EE platform for running modern Web workloads and has invested heavily in Project Zero which aims to make big blue a Web 2.0 player and initially delivers support for Groovy and PHP; BEA has also had some incubation projects going but with the upcoming sale to Oracle it is unclear whether any of those efforts will materialize.

Andi on Web & IT: Java is losing the battle for the modern Web. Can the JVM save the vendors?

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with more than 10 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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I've used Rails. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Interesting article on how Rails features can be more of a hindrance than a help in many situations. Compared here with Django, which can be cleaner and more lightweight.

Some of the bits and pieces that come bundled with Rails are just plain wrong, the Javascript helpers being one example. The abuse of HTTP by default in some of the scaffolding code being another. Oh, and the markup coming out of various helpers as well. In trying to help the application developer Rails gets in the way of the professional webstandards types.

Morethanseven » Why the webstandards world appears to be choosing Django

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with more than 10 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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Creator of Ruby on Rails pays backhanded compliment to PHP

David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Rails, praises PHP for being adequate for "small chores". Wow, what a compliment! Perhaps someone should suggest to Dave that Rails is okay too, as long as you don't care about performance.

The immediacy of PHP

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with more than 10 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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Creator of ELIZA dies

Joe Weizenbaum, the creator of one of the earliest examples of Artificial Intelligence, has died. Weizenbaum created ELIZA, the "virtual therapist", which I've played around with in various implementations over the years. It inspired me to investigate Lisp, so for that reason alone I hold Weizenbaum in high regard.

"A computer will do what you tell it to do, but that may be much different from what you had in mind"

cyclotram: Joe Weizenbaum dead at 85. ELIZA in denial.

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with more than 10 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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Investigating Lua

I'm getting involved in an open source Mac project, YMail, and as part of my research I've been checking out Lua.  From the Lua homepage,

"Lua is a powerful, fast, light-weight, embeddable scripting language."

The project is a Mac interface to Yahoo! Mail, and we need a nice way to deal with the mainly text-based interactions between the desktop and web application.  Objective C, unfortunately, is not particularly suited to text-processing, hence the need for a hybrid solution.

It's still very early days yet, but I'll post progress updates on this blog.

Glen Scott

I’m a freelance software developer with more than 10 years’ professional experience in web development. I specialise in creating tailor-made, web-based systems that can help your business run like clockwork. I am the Managing Director of Yellow Square Development.

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