Jason Rudolph has a great post discussing getting started with git, the new kid on the block for version control.

That post alone makes a compelling argument to me for trying it out. This quote hit a little too close to home:

Do I really want to create a new repository just for this experiment? Should it go in my local repo, or does it belong up on the shared repo? Should I bother setting up the standard dirs for trunk, tags, and branches? Maybe I should just add it to a grab-bag repo for now? Nah. Forget it. It’s not worth the trouble yet.

Other benefits aside, ease of setup is a killer feature for me.

Shawn Hartsock has written an in-depth post on writing a Grails plugin to do audit logging. The post is great on several levels. First, he gives a good introduction to just how easy it is to write a plugin in Grails (mostly because a plugin is just a regular old Grails project with one extra file). The second level of awesomeness is that I’ve really needed audit logging and hadn’t dug into it myself, so by seeing this I’ve gotten out of work and you can’t beat that. Thanks Shawn!

If you’re at all interested in learning Objective-C (maybe working on a little iPhone app…) then do yourself a favor and check out this nice little tutorial that Scott Stevenson wrote over at Cocoa Dev Central. I particularly liked his description of memory management (section 7) because it makes things easier for my too used to garbage collection mind.

Often times the best designs come about when the designer is forced to deal with constraints. In this case some terrific architecture and landscape design has come out of the space constraints presented by the rooftops of urban buildings.

When designers are forced to think about space differently they will come up with ideas and concepts that they would not have otherwise.

I am hoping to see some very interesting things in iPhone application design and pushing what that platform has done and can do in terms of the interface and experience.

I generally kinda hate following the latest meme going around, but I thought this one would actually be interesting to see, so I’m gonna jump in.

[~]$ history 1000 | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
181 gta [alias for grails test-app; this one being first makes me very happy]
144 svn [sync your code frequently!]
57 gra [alias for "grails run-app"]
19 ls
18 cd
13 grails
10 ssh
10 ****** [alias to cd to project directory]
6 svnaa [alias to add files to svn]
5 rm


Amazon continues to blow me away with all their cloud services. This blog post from Michael Nygard shows how Amazon has pretty much eliminated the final roadblocks to using AWS for “real world” applications. Basically they’ve enabled static IP addresses, availability zones, and persistent storage, which were the few sores spots remaining in their cloud services. I’m excited to give this a try sometime soon!