My Macbook had a hardware failure recently and I ended up working on a Windows XP machine briefly. While configuring my development environment, I set up my working directory outside my Windows user profile directory (C:\Documents and Settings\Greg). How did Microsoft ever think ‘Document and Settings’ was a good path for user profiles?! Read the rest of this entry »

If you work with git as your version control system and don’t use a GUI app in your workflow, this one liner in your ~/.profile (or ~/.bashrc on Linux) will display the active branch you’re working on when you cd to a git repo path. Read the rest of this entry »

My contract finished with O2 many months ago, I patiently waited for the release of the iPhone 4 … June 24th came and went, and to cut a long story short, I stuck with my iPhone 3G and (last week) switched to Three.

If you’re running iOS4 on your iPhone, save yourself some time and stop reading now – this only applies for iOS 3.x. Read the rest of this entry »

This month I’ve got a couple of trips to the US, one work, one leisure. I’d like to be able to use some of the dead time during the flight to do some development work. Instead of running PHP, Apache and MySQL from my Mac, I run it from a Ubuntu virtual machine via VirtualBox.

My previous configuration was to use a bridged network so the host could see the guest and access services running on it. Perfect … except when you don’t have a network connection, like when you’re on a flight. Read the rest of this entry »

I can’t remember the last time I stumbled across a bug in MySQL, however this morning I did.
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This was just too painful not to blog about. I hope this saves someone else some pain of reading sed documentation to put together a pattern to match C style header comments.

In my case I’m putting together a build script, part of it is to minify Javascript before deployment.
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