Ted Naleid

There’s a tip over on lifehacker that shows how to open a new window for an application that has no windows currently open by cmd-tabbing to it and then holding down the option key before releasing command.

This didn’t seem like that great of a tip to me at first, because cmd-N brings up a new window in just about any application that this will work for. Then I noticed the first comment where the poster noted that holding option down will also unminimize any minimized windows for that application. Something that I didn’t previously know how to do in native OSX after many google searches.

The native ways of using the keyboard to get it unminimized that I knew of were either kludgy (ctrl-F3 to select the dock and then using the arrows to find the minimized app and hitting return), or required an external app like Witch.

I’ve gotten into the habit of hiding windows (cmd-H) rather than minimizing, but this might get me to start using minimize again.

I just finished the conversion over from a wordpress.com hosted blog to a wordpress blog that I’m running on a slicehost slice.

I think that it’s good to maintain your own linux server and get your hands dirty from time in Apache rewrite rules and php code.

The biggest reason for the switch is that the wordpress instance on wordpress.com completely mangles pasted grails and groovy code. It tries to make things pretty by changing a double dash to an mdash, single dashes to an ndash and double quotes to “smart” quotes (an oxymoron if there ever was one). Not to mention the manual &gt; and &lt; that you need to enter instead of > and <. These insidious changes make pasted code worthless and painful for readers to use.

After struggling with trying to get the formatting working correctly for a few weeks, I decided to host my own blog and use the great wp-syntax plugin.

I did need to do some reformatting on my old posts (as I don’t need to encode things anymore) and I believe that I have everything fixed now.  Let me know if you run across anything I’ve missed in the conversion.

I’m often surprised when I run across developers who don’t have a variety of HTTP traffic monitoring apps as an integral part of their toolkit. When doing Grails development (or any web development really), being able to see the actual information that is going over the wire is invaluable.

Firebug

These days, more and more people are familiar with the amazing Firefox plugin Firebug. It allows you to view request and response information along with many other tricks.

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