For the upcoming Gatekeeper feature in Mac OS X 10.8, Apple will make it easy for customers to prevent software from running that has not been digitally “signed” by developers with a certificate from Apple called the Developer ID certificate. Many developers already choose to sign software using self-generated signing certificates. I wrote many years […]

If learning to program is even a minor goal for you, Code Year (via Brent Simmons) might be just the encouragement you need. They promise to email you on a weekly basis with coding lessons to help you achieve your goal. I’m one of those computer programmers who downplays the difficulty of the profession, because “if I […]

My good friend Brent Simmons invokes a historical email from Linus Torvalds, about his disdain for C++ C++ is a horrible language. It’s made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it’s much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Brent affirms […]

Apple’s sandboxing technologies make it possible to control at a very fine-grain system level exactly which system resources an application should be allowed to access. It offers control over reading and writing  files, opening  network resources, and much more. I’m really excited about sandboxing and also really terrified. Apple has given us, thus far, a […]