If you've not heard of it, MacRuby is an implementation of Ruby 1.9 directly on top of Mac OS X core technologies such as the Objective-C runtime and garbage collector, the LLVM compiler infrastructure and the Foundation and ICU frameworks. Basically means you write in Ruby using Objective-C frameworks, and vice versa. It's pretty damn cool to be honest!

Ran into a problem today where I have a class with a few attributes on it, but I only want a certain three of those attributes to appear in the YAML dump of a class instance.

There's a few useful shorthand ways to create certain objects in Ruby, a couple of obvious ones are [] to create an Array and {} to create a Hash (Or block/Proc). There's some not so obvious ones too, for creating strings, regexes and executing shell commands.

I recently came across the at(1) command, and wondered why it wasn't executing jobs I gave it on my machine. Had a poke around the man pages, and discovered in atrun(8) that by default launchd(8) has the atrun entry disabled.

On a couple of occasions now I've wanted to read from STDIN into an Objective-C command line tool, and both times I've had to hunt quite a bit to find the answer because nothing shows up in google for the search terms I used. "Objective-c read from stdin" and "objc read stdin" both turn up results ranging from using NSInputStream ...