TomArra.com

I recently started using my personal MacBook Air for work. It’s a better piece of hardware then my company issued laptop and I prefer OS X over Windows everyday of the week. But since a lot of the software I use at work I don’t use at home I had to go through and install it all by hand. At least until I found Homebrew.

In the past I had use MacPorts as the way to get things like Python or Node.js installed. It just took forever to download and install mostly because it grabbed a lot of “dependency” packages that were not really needed. With this complaint in mind Homebrew was developed. It’s a much more modern package manager written on Ruby. And the best part, in my opinion, is that the entire install and packages are self contained and easily un-installable if needed. This is something that really bugged me about MacPorts and so I can say I am a happy Ports->Homebrew convert.

I have been doing some digging on new web frameworks and have found a few worth mentioning. The first being a new stylesheet “language” called LESS. The basis of LESS is that CSS on its own it too stiff and you end up having to write a lot of styles in order to get what you want done. LESS gives the ability to add variables, mixins, and even functions within your CSS. You create .less files that get compiled down to .css files that are then read by the browser. The nice thing is that the .less files can be compiled down at different times depending on your needs.

Some developers will compile the files down during development and check in the .css files along with the .less files. Another option, my personal favorite, is to get your server to compile it when requested and then cache it. While this requires something like a rails or django server it makes your life as developer much easier.

Well as usual I have neglected to update this blog as planned. But it’s time to jump back on the horse. It’s been a busy couple of months, both personally and in the tech world, so I have more then enough content to write about. Now I just need to find the time to actually type it all out :/

Made this a while ago and forgot to post it.

While I love taking pictures and using them as my desktop image sometimes it’s nice to have something a little more simple. That’s where Simple Desktop’s come in. It’s a great collection of simple yet fun desktop images that come in very high resolution images so you don’t have to worry about pixelation on your massive 27″ monitor.