http://jameswilliams.me/developer/blog A development blog Mon, 08 Dec 2008 23:13:16 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I wrote some PHP today. I didn't mean to. All I wanted was a way to integrate strategically tagged pictures from flickr into a website. I couldn't find any ready-made solutions to do what I wanted (making sure the page blends in with the rest of the site is the number ... http://jameswilliams.me/developer/blog/2008/12/pragmatic-php/ After watching two fantastic PDC videos, Deep Dive: Dynamic Languages in Microsoft .NET and IronRuby: The Right Language for the Right Job, I started doing some serious thinking about dynamic languages and .NET. At work (where we use VB.Net), we tend to throw around several different data types that are ... http://jameswilliams.me/developer/blog/2008/12/first-steps-with-ruby/ [Ed: I'm changing things up today and writing about Windows. Obviously, the day job is involved.] I've been consistently running into a problem with signtool.exe refusing to work at random points throughout my day. It would complain that it requires capicom.dll v. 2.1.0.1 or higher. Despite the fact that I had ... http://jameswilliams.me/developer/blog/2008/08/signtoolexe-and-capicomdll/ A Cocoa-devmailing list thread popped up recently wondering how to make SOAP calls on an Apple platform. If you follow it through to the conclusion, you'll learn that Patrick decided to roll his own: he's got a base class which communicates with the server and triggers the actual serialization via ... http://jameswilliams.me/developer/blog/2008/08/soap-on-apple-platforms-still-painful/ Introduction Apple's CFNetwork documentation leaves a lot to be desired. At one point while figuring out how to use it, I believe I went on a rant where I described its contents as "vicious lies". Now that I've actually figured it out, I've revised my opinion. The documentation doesn't lie, exactly. ... http://jameswilliams.me/developer/blog/2008/08/http-post-via-the-cfnetwork-stack/ Over on Apple's Cocoa-dev mailing list, Peter Lewis asked if there was a way to release a CGImageRef. It turns out that this is trivial. In a program which isn't garbage collected, you can just cast any CFTypeRef to an id and autorelease it: [(id)myCarbonObject autorelease]. If your app might be ... http://jameswilliams.me/developer/blog/2008/08/autoreleasing-cftyperefs/ After several weeks of playing with it, pouring over Apple's somewhat cryptic documentation, and trying every combination of every flag and order or operation I could think of...I'm finally making SOAP requests with CFHTTPMessage instead of WSMethodInvocation. I can now make the exact same requests (Ping, SearchListLoad, DataFormLoad) that I could ... http://jameswilliams.me/developer/blog/2008/08/quick-status-update/ I'm unhappy with the FriendFeed comment plugin. I'm not knocking its author: I think it's the best that can be done with the current FF API. But it just doesn't work well as the only way to comment on a post. So I've integrated Disqus commenting. I think I like it ... http://jameswilliams.me/developer/blog/2008/07/commenting-approach/ As near as I can tell, NSURLConnection does not support NTLM authentication. So, if you are considering implementing something using NSURLConnection: take a moment to make sure you will never talk to a server expecting you to authenticate via NTLM (which is IIS as near as I can tell) before ... http://jameswilliams.me/developer/blog/2008/07/quick-note-regarding-nsurlconnection-and-ntlm/ A few months ago, I spent a few days searching around to see if I could figure out how to determine the instance variables on a class in ObjC. I knew it was possible because Key-Value-Coding will do it if it can't find the well-named accessor methods for a keypath. ... http://jameswilliams.me/developer/blog/2008/07/accessing-instance-variables-in-objc/