Hiltmon

Xcode does a horrible job of editing Makefiles (and other extension-less files like dot-files).

I have the nerd watch, the 42mm Space Gray Aluminum with the Black Sport Band.

I have been using a set of productivity enhancement tools on my Mac for so long now that the standard, out-of-box OS X user experience seems challenging, crawling, cumbersome and somewhat convoluted.

As mentioned in previous articles, I write a lot of C++11 code on OS X but deploy it on CentOS Linux 6.6 servers.

I’m quoted in Hedge Fund Alert, Aug 5, 2015, reproduced without permission.

This post will present a step-by-step process to convert C++/C++11 Makefile-based projects to Xcode build tools.

Here’s to the nights that turn into mornings and the friends that turn into family Unknown - Unknown Your kindred-family are the close, true friends that are your family when your real blood relatives live far far away.

Note: This is not an advertisement.

Note: This is for Yosemite or before, for El Capitan or later, see A Yosemite Markdown Spotlight Importer.

Last week, Google finally deprecated their non-Oauth APIs, which means that the Google Analytics for Status Board code I have been publishing stopped working.

I love creating new products.

Rust is a project I have been observing for a while now, an attempt to create a new, fast, safe, systems programming language to replace C++, but with better memory safety and a bullet-proof concurrency model.

I’m not a keyboard snob.

I am writing a lot of business documents in Scrivener, and even though it’s the wrong way to do it, I use Scrivener’s format presets (think paragraph styles) to quickly format headings, bulleted lists and paragraphs in each sub-document.

A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away, I wrote a script to import Asana tasks into Omnifocus.

It is quite astounding to me that an astonishing amount of work is done and code written without any knowledge, view or understanding of the bigger picture.

It seems that the Google Analytics use of a public tracking code was a mistake.

StackOverflow Programming happens when much of the functionality of an application is copied and pasted from the code examples found on StackOverflow.

It took me several hours today to figure this one out, so I thought I’d write it up lest I forget.

Nikolai Krill released a major update to CodeRunner today, and I highly recommend it to all programmers no matter what languages you use.

I was asked in a blog comment today how I decide what to write about.

I have finally removed the www from hiltmon.com.

Catch is a simple, open-source, dependency-free unit testing framework for C++ projects.

Thanks to Michael Sheets, the Gist TextMate bundle now works in TextMate 2 on Yosemite.

Dan Frakes (@DanFrakes), previously of MacWorld fame, provides easy to follow instructions on how to create a bootable OS X 10.10 Yosemite installer USB drive on his personal blog.

I have removed TimeToCall from the App Store effective today, for several reasons: I did not update it for iOS 7 (or iOS 8) and it’s starting to look shabby.

For decades we have had corporatization, mass-production, and everything becoming the same, having personality drained from it.

Looks like Jeff Atwood (@CodingHorror), John MacFarlane, David Greenspan of Meteor, and folks from StackExchange, Github and Reddit have put their money where their mouths are and released the first version of Standard Markdown at http://standardmarkdown.…

The quick code cleanup is a process whereby you run through some or all of the files in a software project and tidy them up.

That word is spyware.

In sum and once again: Amazon is not your friend.

I’m working on a C++ product that has a series of client executables that need to talk to a server executable.

WordCounter by Christian Tietze (@ctietze) does one thing, and does it well: It counts the number of words you type in registered applications and displays the total on the menu bar.

If you are running OS X 10.8 or lower, please refer to SonicWall NetExtender for OS X Mavericks, this only works for 10.9 Mavericks and above.

“If you build it, they will come” – Field of Dreams On Monday night, June 30, 2014, I’ll be taking the Kifu servers down and putting up a static sunset site.

At least once a month, step out of your cubicle or office and spend a day on the floor.

So this happened today: Octopress 2 is now using the latest and greatest Jekyll 2.0.3.

Note: This is not a thing, it’s just some idle speculation on my behalf.

I’ve been using OmniFocus as my primary tool for task management for years, yet I never read the GTD book.

More and more of our data, applications, communications, reading and work happens via a browser tab on the internet.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you will know that I do all my writing using Markdown format, short-form in Byword, long-form in Scrivener and generate the final document using Marked.

A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I switched to Markdown format for documents, notes and other scratchings.

Here’s the situation: you have a UNIX script that takes a long time to run, but gets killed when your computer goes to sleep and the SSH terminal or VPN disconnects.

As are we all, I too am active on a bunch of social networks.

I’ve been using OmniFocus forever to record and track my personal and professional actionable to-dos and ideas.

CRINGLY: What’s important to you in the development of a product?

OS X really is a developer’s dream platform, a solid UNIX core on which almost everything compiles with a brilliant graphical environment hosting the most amazing developer tools.

So today I needed to work on an older, open-source based C++ application on my Mac and there was no way to compile it under Xcode 5 even though the development tools were installed and working perfectly.

One of the things that surprised me as I moved back into the land of corporate software is the number of developers I talk to that commute and work in offices and yet develop on remote computers.

Abstract: Programming is still seen as a single-language, single-platform tool-maker role.