I’ve created a new repository on my GitHub account where I can commit some of the little scripts I’ve written for use on my server. The first one I’ve committed is gitcreate, a small script that automates the creation and bootstrapping of git repositories.

I realized that, when I was creating a new repo on my server, I do the same things over and over. Create the repo, then add in some frameworks for whatever little thing I’m playing with at the time. Well, gitcreate can do all that for you. Create the repo and bootstrap in things like the most recent versions of CodeIgniter, jQuery, and Bootstrap. That way, when you clone the repo to start working, you’re already ready to start coding.

Like most of my stuff, it’s licensed under the New BSD License.

A small update to the Mac Oil Price Widget has been released. This fixes a couple of bugs that would cause all prices to be displayed as positive and for the percentage of change to not be accurate.

You can download it over on it’s page.

Because I’ve encountered this problem twice, I’m going to do a little write-up about it. As much for me as for the next person who encounters this problem. In a very un-Apple way, this process is very poorly documented and very un-intuitive from a user-developer standpoint. Everything that’s here, I’ve culled from Googling about aimlessly and finding on Stack Overflow.

**Symptom: **You create a new app in Xcode with no changes and launch it. It launches just fine. You then go to the target summary settings and click “Enable Entitlements” and have an iCloud key/value store and or containers. Now you launch it and nothing happens. Nothing appears, but Xcode still thinks the app is running.

**What’s Happening: **To understand what is happening, you have to go have a look in the Console application (note, the actual system Console.app, not the debug console in Xcode). Open that up and select “All Messages”. Look for something that looks like this:

1/28/12 7:49:03.945 PM taskgated: killed <your app ID>[pid 43838] because its use of the com.apple.developer.ubiquity-container-identifiers entitlement is not allowed

What’s happening is that taskgated is killing your app because it’s not properly signed to use iCloud. And for some reason that is not entirely clear to me, the app being killed is not at all reported back to Xcode - Xcode thinks the app is running. So you just sit there waiting for something to happen with no clue that this sinister lurking background process has killed your app.

How to fix it:

There are two ways you can go from here to fix this. The first and easiest, if you are just turning on entitlements and aren’t intending to use iCloud, you can just remove the iCloud Key/Value Store and iCloud containers from the target summary. After doing this, it should work.

But, if you are making an iCloud-enabled app, there’s a long list of things you need to do. First, understand that you need to be a paid member of Apple Developer Program.

1. Log into ADC. Go to the Mac Dev Center, and the Developer Certificate Utility.

2. Create an App ID by going to App IDs and clicking the Create App ID button in the upper right.

3. Enter the name of your app and the bundle identifier. It usually looks something like “com.company.app”. Click Continue. Your app ID should be entered.

4. Click the App ID you just entered, then click “Enable for iCloud.” Click save.

5. Next, go to Certificates. If you haven’t created any certificates yet, click “Create Certificate” in the upper right and follow the directions. Note, you need both a development and an application certificate.

6. Next, go to Systems. Be sure you’ve added your Mac (and, for good measure, any others you’ll use for development).

7. Finally, go to Profiles.

1. Click Create Profile in the upper right.

2. Select "Development Provisioning Profile"

3. Give it a name.

4. Select the app you created in step 3.

5. Select the certificate you want to use.

6. Select the systems you want to use (I did all).

7. Click "Generate" It may take a few seconds, then it will give you a download.

8. Open the downloaded profile. It will open in the "profiles" preference pane (which doesn't seem to appear until you try to install a profile). Click install.

1. Now, in Xcode:

1. Go to Window > Organizer.

2. Select "Devices" on the top, and "Provisioning Profiles" on the left.

3. At the bottom, select "Automatic Device Provisioning" at the bottom, and click "Refresh". If you've never done this before, you'll need to log in with your ADC username and password.

4. Give it a second, it should pull in your profiles.

5. Go to your project, select your app target and select "Build Settings." Scroll down to "Code Signing." You may need to go to "All" from "Basic" in the predicate selector.

6. Under Code Signing Identity, select the dev profile you just created. Note: don't use the wildcard one - it doesn't seem to work.

Whew. Now, if everything went as planned (and you sacrificed a goat to Tim Cook and Tim found your sacrifice pleasing) you should be able to launch your app with no errors.

But help! I got a weird failure on build!

If you get a failure on build that looks like this:

Command /usr/bin/codesign failed with exit code 1

Then it is possible that your developer certificate is set to “Always Trust” in Keychain. It needs to be set to “System defaults” for reasons that escape me entirely.

Note, this may not be entirely accurate and may even be cargo-cultish. But I’ve encountered this “issue” twice now (once in December, and once now) so I decided to write down my steps so that, in a few months when this befuddles me again, I’ll know where to look for the answer.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget what an amazing modern world we live in. Even if I think back just 10 years ago, it blows my mind how much has changed. Just in technology, even.

In 2002:

1. Nokia was the largest cellphone manufacturer. Their top selling model that year was the Nokia 6100. I actually had one of these as a loaner phone once. At the time I was carrying this more modest model - a Qualcomm QCP-2700, complete with green screen.

2. Tablets as we know them today didn’t exist. Oh sure there were primitive early tablets - Palm Pilots and the Newton come to mind. But they had as much in common with today’s tablets as a horse does with a Ferrari.

3. HP was the leading computer manufacturer that year - following their purchase of Compaq. The same HP that almost sold it’s computer division late last year.

4. Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist, and the best site on the web for tech news was still Slashdot. Wikipedia had just opened the year before and was still seriously lacking content.

5. Mac OS X 10.1 was released that year, and I spent all summer lusting over the Titanium Powerbook G4 with it’s PowerPC processor running at a blazing 800 megahertz and a huge 40gb drive.

6. If you wanted to read a book, you bought a paper book. e-Book readers, while the existed, were clunky and difficult to use, and titles were mostly restricted to technical publications. Nothing like the Kindle, Nook, iPad and other readers.

7. Using the Internet on a mobile device, if it was available at all, was extremely limited. Remember WAP? I remember being amazed in college that I could use my phone to check the scores of other games while I was at an Auburn game.

8. Wanted to find your way around? You had a map or directions. GPSs as we know them today didn’t exist, and certainly weren’t integrated into phones.

Contrast that to today. The phone in my pocket is more powerful, has more storage, than that laptop I spent a whole summer lusting over, and can be used to surf the web just as well as any computer. The tablet I carry with me has access to a whole library of books, can connect wirelessly to the Internet almost anywhere, and can be held with as single hand. If I ever get lost, I can pull up a map on my phone that pinpoints my location to within a few yards of my area, and can give me turn by turn voice directions to get where I’m going.

Facebook and Twitter connect millions of people together. I can even connect to the Internet on my laptop _in an airplane at 35,000 feet! _Downstairs, I have a 60” widescreen TV that’s 1.5” thick and weighs so little that I could mount it on the wall.

Every time I hear people complaining about how things suck, I’m reminded of this video. Because everything really is amazing right now. We are living in an amazing futuristic world full of fascinating advancements that are are happening all the time. And what is most amazing of all is how quickly we got here. The world of tech between now and 10 years ago are so different.

What will the world of 10 years from now be like?

After a far longer wait than was intended, the Mac Oil Price Widget version 2.0 has been released.

It was completely rewritten – like, I didn’t even look at the old code – and uses Bloomberg Energy as it’s information source. The display was also simplified – I really didn’t care about the chart in the old version, so the new version prominently displays the price and how much it’s changed.

Download Here!

About ten years ago (summer of 2002), while I was working in Yellowstone National Park, I took a lot of time that summer for personal reflection. The the rocks beside the Snake River and the roof of the cabin where I lived became close companions of mine. I took a lot of time to examine where my life was at that time, and there were a lot of things that I didn’t like.

Towards the end of the summer, based on my reflections, I started writing a short series of notes to myself. I titled these “Personal Initiatives” and set out what I wanted to change and how I was going to go about doing it.

There were probably 50 or so entries. Some of these were fairly arcane and maybe even silly. Among them:

• Get rid of my acne by washing my face twice a day.
• Wear contacts any time I’m not at home.
• Take better care of my teeth.
• Get in better shape.
• Pursue financial independence and keep a budget.
• Get better grades and get at least a 3.0 from that point out.

After I returned to Auburn that fall, I looked over my Personal Initiatives from time to time. And it occurs to me what a good motivation this was for me. As evidenced, my near term goals in many of my initiatives I achieved within the next 3 years. I never earned less than a 3.0 after that fall. I was financially independent in 2004. I’m in better shape now than I was.

Not only that, but my plans gave me goals. Even the arcane ones (“wash your face every day”) gave me little things that I could do to feel like I had accomplished something every day. Not every goal had to be in outer space - I could accomplish 5 things just by walking out the door each morning.

Of course, some of them I completely blew too. There were a lot of entries about future planning that involved me becoming a pilot. Some other entries concern wanting to have a family (not there just yet…). But overall, I would say my success rate for my personal initiatives in 2002 to today is probably close to 75%.

The reason I’m thinking about this is that I kind of feel a bit like did in the summer of 2002. Lost. Listless. Unsure of what I want in my life but unhappy with where I am. And without a plan. Every day I get up and go to the same job and do the same things I’ve done for the last five years. Then I go home and do the same thing each night. The cycle usually never varies. Now, to be sure, my life is much better than it was in 2002. I’m married, a homeowner, active in my community. But that seem creeping, nagging unhappiness is still there.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of taking an entire summer off to work and reflect on my life. But I’m seriously thinking that it might be time to write down some more personal initiatives. Having passed 30 now, I can’t help but feel that I’ve entered a new stage of my life and, if I don’t want to spend this entire decade listless and unhappy, that I have to begin to plan some things out and set some goals for myself.

Yes. I think it’s time for some more Personal Initiatives.

Just a little announcement about a maintenance release to dystill. 0.2.1 has been released, which brings with it a couple of bugfixes for issues I ran into recently. First, it will now optionally try to create new maildirs when they don’t exist (this is configurable in the config file). There’s also some more error checking to hopefully prevent crazy behavior.

As always, the source is on github.

It’s funny. Even after nearly 10 years with the language, there are still little gotchas that sometimes get me. I ran across one today.

Say you have two objects, and the look like this:

<?php
class ObjA {
    public static function test() {
        global $test;
        var_dump($test);
    }
}

class ObjB {
    public static function test() {
        $test = 1;
        ObjA::test();
    }
}

ObjB::test();
?>

It doesn’t work. You get NULL.

Say I were to do something like this:

<?php
class ObjB {
 public static function test() {
     $test = 1;
     global $test;
     var_dump($test);
 }
}

ObjB::test();
?>

You also get NULL. And this:

<?php
function a() {
    $test = 1;
    b();
}

function b() {
    global $test;
    var_dump($test);
}

a();
?>

Also fails.

The reason is that the global scope on PHP is just that: global. Any time you’re in a function or method, you’re in a local scope and all local scopes are independent of each other. So you can’t global in something from one local scope to another. Variables are either global or local.

That much I get and makes sense (and is in the documentation). What threw me for a loop was that PHP won’t copy something into the global scope from a local scope that is already defined **and will happily overwrite your local scope with a null value from the global scope if one doesn’t exist in the global scope, **in the process of creating the variable in the global scope. If you want a variable in the local scope to be global, you have to declare it as global before you write a value to it.

Or, to put it another way:

<?php
class ObjA {
    public static function test() {
        global $test;
        var_dump($test);
    }
}

class ObjB {
    public static function test() {
        global $test;
        $test = 1;
        ObjA::test();
    }
}

ObjB::test();
?>

Works beautifully.

A few months ago, I decided I wanted to try exploring the Mac App Store ecosystem as a developer. I’ve been writing little Objective-C apps for myself for awhile, and I decided I wanted to see what it was like from the other side.

So I wrote this little app called Airplane Setting. It was a stupid simple little app that made it easy to turn off your radios with a single action. I wrote the app and paid my $99 admission fee. And after a month of back and fourth with Apple and a couple of rejections for what I consider to be dubious reasons as best (especially seeing as how I could point out existing apps in the store that broke the “rule” they said my app was breaking, but whatever, their store, their rules…), my little App was finally approved for sale. It did moderately well, passing 1,000 downloads with virtually no advertising from me.

I had big dreams for this little app. Plugins, global hotkey support, localization, Applescript support, and more potential functionality. But all that was dashed by “Entitlements” and Apple’s requirement that all apps must be sandboxed.

Look, in theory, the idea of sandboxing an app is not bad. The problem here is Apple’s all-or-nothing approach to sandboxing. The selection of entitlements are just so limited as to be nearly useless for anyone creating a unique, new or complex app - especially one that requires hardware access. Your choice is either to sandbox your app, choosing from the available selection of entitlements, or not sandbox it and not be in the Mac App Store at all starting in March. There’s no reason to only provide such a limited subset of functionality that a developer must choose from. Would it not be better to provide us a wider set of entitlements and allow us to justify our reasons for needing them when we submit our app?

The reason Apple gives for requiring sandboxing is to prevent “rogue apps” from destabilizing the system. But when you consider that the App Store itself is curated, this requirement makes even less sense. If Apple is curating the store, how does a “rogue app” end up in the App Store?

I’m a huge Apple fangirl. I have almost all Apple hardware in my house, from my iMac to my Macbook Pros, to my iPad and iPhone and my wife’s iPod Touch. I had AppleTVs before they were cool (and there’s one on every one of my TVs now). I love Apple. But as an developer … I [expletive] hate Apple for this “innovation” that crippled my once-promising little app.

So, at this point, my options are:

1. Leave Airplane Setting in the App Store. Doing so will mean no further updates so I’ll likely cease development.

2. Remove Airplane Setting from the App Store and start distributing it exclusively from the website.

My original intent with Airplane Setting was to explore what it was like to be an App Store developer. I guess … now I know what it’s like to be an App Store developer, and living in constant fear of Apple as a sword of damocles hanging over your head.

Using GoDaddy as my registrar is one of those things I’ve always felt vaguely ashamed of. Something I knew all the “cool kids” didn’t do, but I was already so neck-deep in them that I didn’t want to transfer. Not to mention I had my DNS hosted with them as well so the thought of going through all that trouble to move just seemed like too much of a hassle to deal with without good reason.

In my last entry, I talked about setting up your own DNS server. This was the first part of my attack on moving my domains away from GoDaddy. But I didn’t have a real timeline to move away from them.

Then came the news of GoDaddy’s support for SOPA - one of the worst attacks on the Internet since 1996’s Communications Decency Act.

Now, to be sure, GoDaddy’s position on SOPA was not the first thing they’ve done to anger me. Their overtly misogynistic advertising has always bothered me, and their CEO Bob Parsons’ elephant killing and shameless exploitation of the natives angered me so badly that I almost left in April. But their aggressive support of SOPA was the final straw for me. I’d been a customer since 2003, but I simply could not take it anymore.

So over the course of about 4 days, I transferred all my domains to Namecheap. Having never transferred a domain before, the process was surprisingly quick and easy. Once again, it makes me wonder why I haven’t done it sooner.