Making system calls in OS X I’ve been hacking away on my new Mac ever since I got it last month, and I’m slowly getting all of the native stuff I used to do under Linux moved over to my new environment. Some of the things I’ve gotten installed so far are homebrew (needed to install just about anything that…

Ultraportable I’m in the middle of reconfiguring my computing environment for the new year, and I’m splitting up the role that my laptop has served for the last year or two. I ditched having a desktop a while back, settling on getting a pretty powerful laptop instead. That was something of a tradeoff since the then-current generations of desktops were…

Palm Pre as an ARM development environment As I play around with my Raspberry PI, I keep having these flashbacks to the days when I first put my Palm Pre into developer mode. I logged into the phone as root and it was a Linux box! That was a bit of a revelation to me then. I went ahead and…

First thoughts on the 13″ Retina Macbook I recently got a new retina Macbook Pro for my main work machine. I had been using a Thinkpad X200 and then a 13″ Macbook Air. I’m very opinionated when it comes to computing devices and the Thinkpad X series is actually one of my favorite laptop designs of all time. I know…

Galvanize I recently had a short post that rode the front page of Hacker News for the better part of 24 hours, spending at least 8 hours at the number one spot. Compared to my last popular piece , this post took very little time to write. Really it was just a thought, an annoyance that I was experiencing over…

I don’t want to download your app I’m getting sick of being prompted by random Web sites to download their special iPhone app. I really just want to use the site without having to clutter up my phone with yet another single-purpose app. I can’t put my finger on exactly when so many sites started prompting iPhone users to download…

Raspberry PI first look The Raspberry PI single-board computer has been getting a lot of buzz since its launch early this year. For the first few months it was nearly impossible to get one of these things, and even now the only distributor that seems to have a reliable stock is Farnell in the UK. Well, I just got one…

Thinking about Raspberry PI for audio I’ve been busy with some audio projects recently but haven’t had much time for writing. Hopefully that changes soon, but in the meantime I’ve had some thoughts on future projects that I wanted to jot down. Usually I take my notes on this stuff in private, but I figured why not try riffing on…

Working with chaos I was intrigued by Netflix’s recent open source release of the Chaos Monkey service. I hear stories of continuous deployment scenarios at companies like Amazon that are able to effectively detect and roll back bad code changes automatically, but a system that intentionally sabotages part of the infrastructure just seems outright crazy. I’ve long been a proponent…

Data persistence, normalization and cardinality I’m not a big fan of object-relational mappers and tricky data access schemes. I’m also a fan of good data normalization in relational database systems. I’m somewhat new to key-value and document stores, but I have done projects using things like Amazon’s new DynamoDB. I’m doing some work on a side project that involves counting…