Thoughts and Ramblings

General things I find of interest.

Nix on Mac

A couple of months ago, I started using Nix on the Mac instead of homebrew. This included setting up home-manager and nix-darwin. There are a lot of setup guides on these and I’m not going to repeat that work. I will mention some pieces that I found particularly annoying and their solutions. Multiple Repositories Nix allows you to specify multiple repositories where it can fetch code. However, getting this to work with home-manager can be annoyingly difficult to figure out, especially if you use a flake with multiple files like myself.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Monday, December 16, 2024

A Month with AppCode

Anyone who uses multiple IDEs along with Xcode recognizes just how far behind Xcode is compared to others. I would even go as far as to argue it is at least half a decade behind Eclipse. Features which I have long grown use to having are completely absent in Xcode. Then, about a month ago, I discovered AppCode and started using it for my Obj-C development at work. I could repeat the feature set mentioned on their website, but instead I’ll assume you’ve read that and outline the crucial parts.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Monday, April 29, 2013

Trac.fcgi Memory Usage

I’ve been slowly transitioning to using nginx as the web front-end in an effort to reduce Apache’s memory usage. In keeping with this task, I’m moving more and more off of Apache. One piece I recently moved was trac, transitioning to using it directly by nginx by running it in fast-cgi mode where as previously it was running as cgi though Apache. While fast-cgi is faster, it has inherent issues, such as any memory leak can result in ever growing memory usage, which is exactly why Apache has a setting for each child to serve a limited number of requests before exiting.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, October 16, 2010

Google Link Redirection (cont.)

Earlier I wrote about google’s link redirection. I have finally finished my testing of a Safari extension which kills this behavior. I didn’t want to release this extension until the updating mechanism worked and that is what took me so long. Anyway, here is the the extension. Enjoy, and let me know what you think.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Saturday, October 9, 2010

Googleâ€™s Link Redirection

Google, for quite some time, has been redirected clicks on links in their search results to www.google.com/url?…. While I don’t approve of such practices, I didn’t mind it so much since this is presumably an effort to improve their search results. That changed recently, when I noticed that my history in Safari was filled with entries containing that URL as the title. Considering the fact that I often use the history to re-find a page with pertinent information, this is bordering on making my browser usage useless.

Posted by Thoughts and Ramblings on Tuesday, August 31, 2010