Mike West works and plays on the internet. Currently working as a software engineer on Google's Chrome team in Munich, he tries to make the web platform marginally less insecure than it generally is. Drop him an email at mike@mikewest.org follow him on Twitter or circle him on Google+
I’ve seen a few Universal Binary builds of SSHKeychain floating around, but I’m paranoid, so I built my own. It’s easier than I expected.
Metissian’s pre-build Subversion binaries are out of date, and Dan Benjamin’s excellent guide to building Subversion yourself runs into a wall for 1.4+. You, however, are an impatient pioneer. You want to build the latest stable (impatient, not _imprude
SVK is a version control system that sits on top of a Subsverion, CVS, Perforce, etc. repository, and provides the promise of a common interface. Here’s how to install it on OS X.
Jack Slocum’s new comment system is really inspirational.
Help me find an apartment, please?
Rui Carmo wrote a great python script to backup e-mail from an IMAP server.
You don’t need a powerful SVN server in order to reap the benifits of version control. This article explains how to set up repositories on any machine you have SSH access into.
I use Mint to analyze the traffic on this website. It’s a powerful tool, made more powerful with some excellent plugins.
leave is a brilliant little utility that annoys you at a pre-specified time until you log out.
My latest article for Digital Web, ‘Scope In JavaScript’, is up and waiting for you to read it.
A short list of articles worth reading for interviewers or interviewees.
The interview articles I found yesterday had more than a few common “phone screen” questions that I decided to make sure I could answer: here’s what I came up with.
DOM calls are expensive; this article walks through one quick way to optimize them out of your code.
John Garner has translated the revision control article I wrote for A List Apart into French! Exciting!
Brad Choate has a great summary of what looks like a wonderful presentation on Subversion best practices, given at OSCON 2006 by Ben Collins-Sussman & Brian W. Fitzpatrick
I’ve got an article up on A List Apart, introducing my favourite behind-the-scenes development tool: Subversion.
I hate being sick.
I’ve got an article up on Digital Web, outlining the processes I use to build accessible UI controls for web applications.
A wayward mod_rewrite rule broke my Subversion commits with 403 (“Forbidden”) errors. Here’s how I fixed it.
I’ve joined Digital Web Magazine’s editorial team. Yay!
Your code can be faster! Here are a few tips to help you speed up the toughest pieces of your JavaScript.
SQLite is a nice little database engine that can be incredibly fast as a website backend. Installing it on OS X is equally quick.
A new version of mcw_ma_gnolia fixes an issue with parsing Ma.gnolia’s new linkroll format.
Setting up virtual domains on your local OS X Apache installation is pretty easy. Here’s a quick description of the process.
A quick note about a TextMate language bundle for Textpattern that integrates with mcw_templates.
The “Hello World!” of Subversion post-commit hooks is the use of SVNnotify to send e-mails out to a project team every time a new revision is committed to the repository. This is easier than it sounds.
Subversion has a very powerful system for associating metadata with the files you have under version control. This article describes how to automate the process of adding properties to the files you put under version control using auto-props.
I have three kinds of mod_rewrite rules in my .htaccess file, this article explains each, and lays out best practices for managing your site’s URL scheme.
mcw_ma_gnolia is a TextPattern plugin that generates a customizable Ma.gnolia link roll for use on your website.
Describes the easy process of setting up a mac for resale (patches, etc) while keeping the Setup Assistant experience for the new owner.
mcw_templates is a TextPattern admin plugin, enabling the trivial export of pages, forms, and CSS rules to a specified folder for convenient editing, and the subsequent import of new and updated files.
mcw_templates is a TextPattern plugin allowing the export/import of pages, forms, and css rules to files for external editing.
I’ve redesigned, and moved the site to a new server. Exciting, eh?
DataRequestor is a JavaScript wrapper for the XMLHttpRequest object that enables the trivial implementation of dynamic interfaces without the painful necessity for a complete page-refresh to talk to the server. It’s Ajax without the confusing API.
The PerfectTime JavaScript class gets updated to support the hCalendar format.
We can use JavaScript to deal with the nasty annoyance of displaying times in a user’s local time-zone.