Dented Reality

All posts tagged 'development'

Mounting Remote Filesystems in OSX

Dec 01 2011
46

       

Most of my work for Automattic is done on a remote sandbox machine, somewhere in Texas. I’ll often jump in and make smaller edits over SSH via vi, but when I’m doing something bigger I much prefer to work locally, using TextMate (I’m on a Mac, obviously). To do that, I need to be able to access files as if they were local, which means either duplicating them to my machine (lame, annoying) or mounting them directly.

I’ve been doing that via one of the following options, and I’m wondering if anyone out there has a better solution.

I’ve tried both for a while now. They both work. Except for when they don’t. Here’s what I’d found:

  • Transmit seems more responsive, when it’s working
  • Macfusion often crashes Finder the first time I access a newly connected filesystem (and is then reasonably stable)
  • Transmit much more randomly just stops working and gives no indication, I just can’t browse any more and have to disconnect/reconnect
  • Macfusion allows you to easily customize a neat icon for each filesystem
  • Transmit seems to have more aggressive caching (or a longer TTL on it) of filesystem details (part of what makes it feel more responsive)

So, have you used one of the following methods? Is there a configuration option I’m missing? How do you go about solving this problem?

UPDATE: I should have mentioned that I need to be able to do this over the open internet (securely), where I’m not connected directly to the same network as the server.

WordPress Plugins for Multiple Versions

Aug 05 2010
3

WordPressIf you’re a WordPress Plugin developer, you may find yourself in the unenviable position of needing to maintain one of your plugins across multiple versions of WordPress. Until recently, I maintained the IntenseDebate plugin for versions 2.5 and up of WordPress, including versions 2.6 of WPMU and up. That’s a lot of versions (10 actually, not counting minor revisions). Here are some tips I picked up/developed to try to make my life a little easier along the way.

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Lessons Learned

Aug 03 2010
1

A few weeks ago I had a pretty rough time with something I was working on, so I thought I’d take the chance to share some lessons with you that I learned along the way. I’m taking these specifically from my experience as a developer of web-based systems, but I feel like at least some of them apply to a lot of other situations in life as well. YMMV.

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WordCamp NYC Round Up

Nov 17 2009
4

This past weekend, WordCamp NYC was held at Baruch College in New York. It was (I believe) the second biggest WordCamp to date, if not the biggest (by number of attendees), right up there with WordCamp San Francisco. WCNYC was an incredibly busy event, with so much great WordPress stuff going on at any one time that it was hard to decide what to attend. I was lucky enough to be able to present/be involved in not just one, but 4 presentations throughout the weekend, and I wanted to get some slides and details up here for reference.

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Quick PHP Tip

Jul 29 2009
5

If you’re coding in PHP and checking variables to see if they have a strlen() == 0, or isset() or a variety of other possibilities, you might consider using empty() instead. It’s quite versatile and is nice because it doesn’t trigger any warnings or notices if you use it on a variable which hasn’t been set yet. Here are some examples to show you what it will match against:

<?php

$zero_string  = '0';
$zero_int     = 0;
$false        = false;
$empty_string = '';
$array        = array();
$obj          = new stdClass();

echo empty( $zero_string ) ? "'0' = empty\n" : '';
echo empty( $zero_int ) ? "0 = empty\n" : '';
echo empty( $false ) ? "false = empty\n" : '';
echo empty( $empty_string ) ? "'' = empty\n" : '';
echo empty( $array ) ? "array() = empty\n" : '';
echo empty( $obj ) ? "stdClass() = empty\n" : '';
echo empty( $foo ) ? "foo is empty (and the variable was never set)\n" : '';