2012 - Michael Bianco

Billings Pro Touch Server & Client Syncing Issues

Quick tip for anyone having issues with getting their iPhone’s Billings Pro app to sync with a local Billings Pro server: I recently grabbed a Asus RT-N16 and flashed it with DD-WRT. It was working great until I was fiddling with some of the wireless settings and accidentally reset the router. After reconfiguring the router, my iPhone with Billings Pro Touch would not sync with the local Billings Pro Server. For some reason it seemed that the network tab on the server admin GUI wasn’t picking up my lastest public IP and/or reporting it to the switchboard service correctly. To fix your reported public IP: log out of the switchboard, click advanced, manually set your public IP, and login to switchboard again…

MacRuby 0.12, RVM, and Gem Installation Problems

I recently jumped back into a MacRuby project that I haven’t touched in a while. I upgraded to the latest MacRuby 0.12, installed the necessary gems via macgem install, and was presented with this error:[code]Segmentation fault: 11[/code] Since I started this project my ruby setup had drastically changed: RVM, custom irbrc, and lots of other tools that I’ve found essential for productive rails development had been installed. I noticed that macgem list –local returned the list of gems needed for my rails project. Running env from the command line revealed that GEM_HOME and GEM_PATH were set explicitly in my bash env, a result of having RVM installed and a non-system ruby set as default…

Cocoa User Interface Buttons: Previous and Next

I created these years ago, but forgot to post them until now: back forward icons for a Cocoa / Objective-C application. PSD + TIFF files included. They were designed during the snow leopard (possibly the leopard) era, but they still look decent. Should be a good starting point for anyone looking to design a custom previous and next button set for their Mac application. Download Cocoa UI Previous and Next Images

Social Norms vs Market Valuation

I’m reading Predictably Irrational a really fascinating book, especially for those who have any interest in economics. One of the chapters that I’ve just finished discusses the ‘two worlds’ of valuation and exchange: one which is ruled by ‘social norms’ and the other by cold rational market analysis. The interesting psychological element to these two ‘worlds’ is that once you cross the threshold into the world of market analysis, you can’t go back. The author cites an example of a day care center which created a new rule which attached a monetary file to arriving late to pick up your child. Once the fine was implemented, more parents arrived later to pick up their children…

Convert MS SQL Database to CSV or MySQL

This is more of a thorny issue that you would at first expect – Microsoft does not provide an easy way out of their database if you are on a different platform. The open source (or paid!) tools available for interacting with Microsoft SQL databases on OS X are very limited. There are not any native GUIs available (to my knowledge), I’ve found that getting TDS up and running is a pain, and it seems impossible to import a .bak or ms sql insert dump. Additionally, I’ve had weird encoding + CSV formatting issues when given a CSV exported from a dump given to me. I’ve discovered a workaround to the issue that has worked reliable for very large data sets (30,000+ rows). Oracle’s SQL Developer application can connect to a ms sql database…

Product Pricing in a Zero Marginal Cost Distribution Environment

Jarrod Drysdale on digital product pricing: Our strategies were very different. Sacha wrote a book and priced it relative to the cost of other books, which is the strategy just about everyone follows. Instead of that, I wrote a book and priced it based on the value it provides. Choosing a pricing strategy based on competition is a natural approach, but also a flawed one. Price competition implies scarcity—supply and demand market forces. There is no scarcity for ebooks because digital files are replicated practically for free…

PHP, MS SQL, and Linux

Note: this was a draft from 2009. I never finished documenting everything, and I (thankfully!) no longer have to integrate with the MS SQL database mentioned here. However, I figured I throw this information out there in case someone was running into the same configuration issues I was. — Usually I am lucky enough that most of my clients don’t have many of their internal operations tied into their web site’s databases; if they are using MS SQL or some other database engine that isn’t open source I’m able to easily convince them to transfer their data over to MySQL. Recently I was working with a client where this wasn’t the case, there was no way around it: I would have to integrate with a MS SQL database…

MacRuby, CocoaPods, 10.7, and XCode 4.3

I have a MacRuby project that uses CocoaPods for many of its ObjC dependencies. I had a bit of trouble getting it to run properly with the latest version of Xcode (4.3). This had to do with a recent change I made to MABSupportFolder (use of isEmpty()) which triggered a fairly obscure bug in addition to the new XCode 4.3 organizational structure not being properly recognized at first. The obscure MacRuby bug was being caused by running -count on an NSString. When using MacRuby if you test if a NSString responds to -count using -respondsToSelector: you’ll get true as the response because of Ruby’s String#count method. However, that method requires an argument, but running respondsToSelector:@selector(count) will return true for an NSString…

Create Gzipped Tar Archive Service for OS X 10.6 + 10.7

Although the tgz command line syntax is very simplistic, I’ve never managed to remember the exact flags for the command line interface. Additionally, if I’m clicking around in the Finder I don’t want to have to fall back to the command line to create a tgz archive. Inspired by this hint you can download a service to create a tgz archive that works with Snow Leopard and Lion.

Scripting OmniGraffle: MySQL Visualization & JSON Representations

OmniGraffle is a great tool for visually mapping out complex relationships or hierarchical structures. Often when working in groups where some of the personnel have no programming or mathematical background OmniGraffle is a great tool to bridge the gap. Converting OmniGraffle Hierarchy to JSON Often I’ll use OmniGraffle to map out site structures with non-programmers. The challenge is once everything has been done in OmniGraffle it is normally a manual process to convert the data in OmniGraffle to a structured data representation, like JSON, that is easy to programmatically work with. Or, in my specific case, output the structured OmniGraffle document into a text document that could be reviewed and edited by others on a Google Doc…

Year: 2012