It’s been over a year that I’ve been running the NSCoder Night meetings in London from here, but I’ve now moved it to a site of its own. You can now get all the information from NSCoderNightLondon.com.

Blog style entries never really worked. I hope that having everything together in just a few pages on a site makes it easier for people who want to turn up.

I hope that it floats up higher in Google Rankings as well. This will also make it easier for people who want to turn up.

It came about that I wanted to do some work with git and signed tags. It’s been a while since I had looked at this, I’ve got some old entries up on keyservers that date back to 1999, and never on a Mac.

It turns out that it is quite simple to set up a minimal GPG environment – one that lets you work on the command line without having to set it up for Mail.app. This is about all I need it for.

You may have seen John Gruber’s posts on uninstalling system-wide flash and changing the Safari User Agent to view some sites that have Flash content.

The new MacBook Airs don’t have Flash installed by default so this is a tl:dr summary of those two articles so you don’t have to download and install the system-wide Flash player.

Many sites, such as YouTube, provide content in an alternative format for devices that do not have Flash installed. Get access to this from Safari by turning on the ‘Develop’ menu (Preferences | Advanced) and change the User Agent to ‘Mobile Safari 3.2.2 iPad’. This works per tab|window so doesn’t change the display in what you already have open.

If this still doesn’t work (I’m looking at you iPlayer) then you can use Google’s Chrome browser, which comes with its own Flash plug-in.

Many times you will see a shortened url but you aren’t sure what it points at. Here’s a little tip that I picked up from Tom Morris.

Pop open your terminal, or console, or whatever your command-line application is and type the following:

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curl --head shorturl

This pops up a short amount of useful information about the target url. For example the response for the Google short URL for this site shows this;

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~ % curl --head http://goo.gl/oQx8
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Expires: Sat, 16 Oct 2010 21:01:51 GMT
Date: Sat, 16 Oct 2010 21:01:51 GMT
Cache-Control: private, max-age=86400
Location: http://abizern.org/
X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
Server: GSE
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

And you can see that the Location shows that you aren’t going to get Rick-rolled.

I gave a short presentation to the London iPhone Developer Group at the Apple store in London this week.

20 minutes is far too short to cover such a large subject but I did what I could. I have been given another opportunity to present in the future and I’m going to skip the boring beginner bits and just cover 3 or 4 advanced Git techniques which should be more fun.

For what it’s worth, here are the slides. Probably not much help unless you were there (I prefer more talk and less slides) and I apologise for being weak and using bullet points.

Download the Keynote presentation (540 kb)

Download the PDF slides (220 kb)

“A coding dojo is a safe place to deliberately practice and develop your coding skills.”

I went to my first London Python Dojo last night and had a better time than I expected. I know a little Python) (just enough to hurt myself). I was intrigued by this event where the idea was to learn together rather than just share knowledge.

I’ve been inspired by Pieter Omvlee of Bohemian Coding and his 365Cocoa to set up my own contribution.

I’m going to try and and fill a year with git tips and inspirations over at 365git. I’ve got a few weeks worth of ideas but if anyone wants to know anything or has a suggestion, I’ll gratefully consider them.

You may have occasion to rename an Xcode project.

You can find step-by-step instructions and scripts with a little bit of Googling. But there is another way. If you’re running Xcode 3.2 on Snow Leopard there is a menu item you can use instead. Have a look at the Project > Rename… menu item instead.