Category Archives: Programming

The software industry lacks political clout

Posted on November 22, 2007 by luis

So I’m still upset at this new Maryland tax on software services. I hope it is not a harbinger of what is to come. Hopefully it is just a bad move that is a short term fix for whatever is … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming, Washington DC | 3 Comments

Taxes on consulting?

Posted on November 21, 2007 by luis

I woke up this morning and nearly spit out my coffee as I read that the neighboring state of Maryland (I live in Virginia) is going to start charging sales tax on computer consulting – to the tune of 6%. … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming, Washington DC | 3 Comments

DC Mac Programmer Meeting – February 23rd

Posted on February 17, 2006 by luis

Calling all Mac programmers in the DC area! We’re going to have the first DC Mac Programmer Meeting of 2006. (We last met in November, which I’ll have a recap of later.) And when I say we, I mean the … Continue reading →

Posted in Cocoa, Programming | Comments Off

Creating a branch in Subversion from a specific older revision

Posted on January 10, 2006 by luis

Branches in Subversion are quite easy and really lightweight. I think the technical term for this is “cheap copy”, which doesn’t quite do it for me. I mean, I’d rather call it an elegant and efficient copy, but I didn’t … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming, Random | Comments Off

How to fix certain SVN commit errors

Posted on December 5, 2005 by luis

If you’re getting an error message that looks like: subversion/libsvn_client/commit.c:832: (apr_err=155005) svn: Commit failed (details follow): Then try backing up your project directory and re-check it out from Subversion using “svn co “. If you then get something that looks … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Comments Off

Mac Programmer Meeting in Northern Virginia – November 17th

Posted on November 14, 2005 by luis

We’re having a meeting of the Programming SIG of the Washington Apple Pi, which is the big local Mac users group in the area. It should be fun. The group started rewriting a Cocoa app using Core Data and Bindings … Continue reading →

Posted in Cocoa, Mac OS X, Programming | Comments Off

Review: My Job Went to India

Posted on September 29, 2005 by luis

The Pragmatic Programmers just released a great book. It’s titled My Job Went to India (and all I got was this lousy book) – 52 Ways to Save Your Job. It’s also known as MJWTI. If you’re expecting Lou Dobbs, … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Programming | 1 Comment

Act like a business to keep your job

Posted on September 7, 2005 by luis

Chad Fowler, who maintains RubyGarden and… well, actually let me just quote from THE Ruby book, the Pickaxe: “Chad Fowler is a leading figure in the Ruby community. He’s on the board of Ruby Central, Inc. He’s one of the … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | Comments Off

We need tool builders

Posted on July 6, 2005 by luis

“We need to get (students) to the level of creating original works with their skills,” Stephenson said. “We want to see a generation of tool builders, not just tool users, because tool builders have the economic power in the world.” … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming | 5 Comments

Iterating over OrderedCollections

Posted on May 25, 2005 by luis

One of the things you want to do after having an OrderedCollection (aka List or Array) is to iterate over the elements. I’ll look at the languages I’m interested in: Smalltalk, Java, Objective-C, Ruby, Python, and C#. First off, Smalltalk. … Continue reading →

Posted in Cocoa, Desktop Java, Programming, Rails | Comments Off