Localghost 1.0 Released

I’d been looking for an excuse to create a Cocoa app for a while. Even though I still switch hit between Ubuntu and OS X, I spend most of my time on OS X these days. I’d gotten Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X a while back, but had been missing that real-but-simple app idea to give it a whirl on. Until Localghost.

You see, I edit my /etc/hosts litearlly a dozen+ times a day when I want to test things in their production configuration, but with my development version. Localghost adds / removes a set of selected hosts from /etc/hosts with a system tray applet. There’s more info here:

Localghost page.

Gitfeed, Git to RSS and the growing collection of small hacks

I’ve finally succumbed to the Github bug and have been slowly offloading small projects that I’ve created mostly for work stuff. The latest of these is a relatively small hack to produce an RSS fit from a Git repository, which I’d wanted to have posted in our intranet.

Usage is simple and includes a command line thinger so that uses sinatra, so you can get it all in one go.  The source and docs are here.

Additonal hacks that have now been thrown into the wild:

  • fooq — a little wrapper around GCC that lets you write C / C++ one-liners or small script like thingers, and automatically includes and links Qt, without having to futz about with a make file or a main function, etc.
  • QActiveResource — a hack for work since we make heavy usage of ActiveResource to pull data. This one’s a lot faster than ActiveResource for reading data — basically a C++ implementation of the find method. Details in the company blog, or naturally on Github.
  • ShoParTender — Greasemonkey script to make the Shopify partners panel less unweildy. Details in the Shopify developers forum.
  • Chuckery — A bunch of my utility classes and my preprocessor for the ChucK audio synthesis language. Finally got around to converting this old CVS repo to git.
  • Quebec — A graphical (Qt) frontend to the standard command line calculator, bc. Includes history copy-paste and all that jazz.

I’ve realized that slowly I’m becoming a Ruby-ist. I still feel mediocre at the language, but more and more I’m finding it my go-to language for quick hacks. Drinking the Github Kool-Aid just brings me one step closer to the fold.