lifecoding.com Blog

Though building sites with ssl is cool and gives your users a sense of security, configuring a webserver with ssl can be a royal pain. Thankfully, there’s pound. Pound is a “is a reverse proxy, load balancer and HTTPS front-end for Web server(s).”

Pound is dead simple to setup and configure. Unfortunately, the darwin port for pound is old and does not work. So this guide will help you build pound on your own. Besides, everyone feels cooler after compiling that hot fire. Click on for the steps.

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While working on the upcoming presentation, I came to the realization that I have never used Microsoft Powerpoint. Being a good dork, I decided that now was not the time to learn and instead set out to find presentation software that would allow me to post my presentation to the web. S5 to the rescue. S5 is a creation of Eric Meyer that runs on html, css, and javascript. It looks great, is easy to use, and your presentation can be viewed by anyone anywhere. Great work Eric!

So, I’m sure you’re sitting there wondering what kind of bum doesn’t update his blog with more super cool posts about higher order procedures like he said he would. Well, it’s not my fault, honest. I wanted to post cool little blurbs about how fun it can be to map array elements, but big bad Websense said no. Read a little bit more, and I’ll tell you my proposed solution.

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I just spent 20 minutes trying to find an annoying bug in my program. The cause of the bug? I accidently used the variable ‘i’ in a for loop instead of ‘i__’. For now, let’s just accept that I have to use global variables and weird names such as i__. It’s part of the requirements of the current project on which I’m working. Anyway, this is a bug that could occur in any number of situations where global variables are present. So, we need a way to quickly hunt and destroy these bugs.

My proposed solution? For any programming language that you work in, you should have a utility that allows you to quickly identify variables within a certain scope and to see what type of value they might contain. This would have allowed me to select the function I was working on and notice that there was an extra variable ‘i’ that was initialized as global.

I can think of another situation in which this type of tool would be handy. It could be used to add macro writing capabillites (ala lisp) to any desired language. It already has full knowledge of the constructs of the language and the functions and variables that exist. And so long as the macro could be compiled to the desired language, macro functionality would be available. Maybe you’ll see this sort of tool available here in the future.