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Benjamin Esham

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Essays on software development and other nerdy topics.

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Aug 20, 2025
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  1. iOS development tip: use trash instead of rm to clear your DerivedData
    Aug 20, 2025 · original
    Every iOS and Mac developer is familiar with the situation: Xcode has gotten itself wedged somehow and the only solution 1 is to blow away the “DerivedData” folder in ~/Library/Developer/Xcode . Cache invalidation is hard but in this case cache destruction is easy, and I have a tip that makes it even easier. The obvious way to delete your DerivedData from the command line is $ rm -r ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData But rm needs to enumerate every file and directory within DerivedData in order to delete them. The more files there are, the longer this will take. It’s faster to move the DerivedData folder to the Trash. You could do this from the Finder, but I prefer to install Ali Rantakari’s trash utility and then run $ trash ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData This is faster than the rm approach because it’s effectively just moving a single directory. It also means that your Derive
  2. https://esham.io/2025/07/1
    Jul 13, 2025 · original
    Prospective cylinder Nonmatriculated cylinder Transfer cylinder ABD cylinder Graduated cylinder
  3. Curate your shell history
    May 31, 2025 · original
    Simon Tatham wrote an article recently called “Policy of transience” , explaining (among other things) why you might want to disable your shell history file. Simon writes: My unusual habit is: turn off the history file completely, by putting the command ‘ unset HISTFILE ’ in my .bashrc . I still get history within a single instance of the shell, so I can edit my last command ten times until it works properly; but history isn’t shared between my terminal windows, or preserved when I log out and log in again. All the shell history I allow myself is localised and short-term. […] If I type a shell command that’s valuable – one that did something useful enough that I might want it again in future, and long and complicated enough that I’d be annoyed to have to figure it out a second time from scratch – then I can’t rely on it just happening to be in my .bash_history . So instead I put it somew
  4. https://esham.io/2025/05/2
    May 29, 2025 · original
    Happy to announce my new Haskell personal-finance app, Yoneda Budget
  5. How to self-host the Anki sync server in a FreeBSD jail
    May 22, 2025 · original
    Anki is a cross-platform flashcards app. It uses spaced repetition to show you your flashcards at the (hopefully) optimal times for building long-term recall. The Anki apps on various platforms can sync with each other. The Anki sync server is open-source; by default, the apps sync with a server instance that the Anki developers generously maintain for free. But you still might want to run your own: your data will be under your own control; syncing will be quite a bit faster; 1 outages will only happen when you mess something up; and self-hosting things is fun! This article will show you how to run your own private instance of the Anki sync server within a jail on a FreeBSD server. It assumes that you already have a FreeBSD server and a basic understanding of the jail feature. It also assumes that you have some experience with self-hosting and can set up either a reverse proxy or a VPN .
  6. https://esham.io/2025/05/1
    May 11, 2025 · original
    Alice wants soup and doesn’t care which kind. Bob is also hungry but he’s a vegetarian. They eat some cream of mushroom soup. This is an example of bouillon satisfiability
  7. https://esham.io/2025/04/1
    Apr 9, 2025 · original
    box-sizing: border-collie;
  8. https://esham.io/2025/01/2
    Jan 15, 2025 · original
    Place value notation is so based
  9. Authoritarians thrive on misinformation, and Apple is providing it as a service
    Jan 9, 2025 · original
    Oppressive regimes benefit when people are confused, when they cannot tell fact from fiction. “To abandon facts is to abandon freedom,” warns Yale history professor Timothy Snyder . “If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.” George Lakoff and Gil Duran of FrameLab agree : “Once we can no longer discern fact from falsehood (or we no longer care), the authoritarians win.” As we grimly await the start of the second Trump administration, Apple has decided that it would be a good idea to use “ AI ” to generate summaries of the notifications on your phone. Chatty group text? Busy email thread? Lots of news happening? Your iPhone will try to condense each one into a single glanceable notification. As a high-level idea for a feature, this might not seem unreasonable. But anyone who’s watched the
  10. https://esham.io/2025/01/1
    Jan 6, 2025 · original
    Chappell Roan’s Feminomenonaninoff Second Piano Concerto
  11. https://esham.io/2024/11/1
    Nov 12, 2024 · original
    When choosing a Lisp, it’s important to select one with a rich ecosystem of third-party libraries so that you have a strong foundation for rewriting everything yourself
  12. https://esham.io/2024/08/1
    Aug 29, 2024 · original
    tls-terminating cliché
  13. An odd gap in Swift’s checking of protocol conformances
    Jul 11, 2024 · original
    Idiomatic Swift code relies heavily on protocols, 1 so I was surprised yesterday when I tripped over a fairly simple oversight in Swift’s ability to verify that a given class conforms to a protocol. Consider this simple protocol and class: enum Color { case bondiBlue case beige } protocol Paintable { func paint ( _ color : Color ) } class Bookshelf : Paintable {} We’re defining a protocol that includes a method, and we’re defining a class with nothing in it. We’re also claiming that the class conforms to the protocol. But this is obviously not valid: Bookshelf does not include an implementation of paint () . And indeed, if you try to compile this file 2 you’ll get an error: error: type 'Bookshelf' does not conform to protocol 'Paintable' Here’s the weird thing, though. If we add a protocol extension that provides an overloaded version of paint () with a default argument value… extension
  14. https://esham.io/2024/06/1
    Jun 16, 2024 · original
    When someone says “Slack is just IRC ,” what I hear is “I should never be allowed near a product-design decision.”
  15. Tidbits from Wikipedia articles about tall buildings
    Jun 16, 2024 · original
    Wikipedia’s article about the Sears Tower mentions two people who have climbed it: On May 25, 1981, Dan Goodwin, wearing a homemade Spider-Man suit while using suction cups, camming devices, and sky hooks, and despite several attempts by the Chicago Fire Department to stop him, made the first successful outside ascent of the tower. […] In August 1999, French urban climber Alain “Spiderman” Robert, using only his bare hands and bare feet, scaled the building's exterior glass and steel wall all the way to the top. After which he presumably called Goodwin and said, “That’s how a real Spider-Man does it, you pansy.” The same article says that when it opened, the building had “a cooling system capable of 17,000 tons of refrigeration.” Wait, what? I know about this ton and this other ton and even this one , but those are all units of mass. How does that translate into cooling ability? I learne
  16. https://esham.io/2024/05/3
    May 28, 2024 · original
    I have not called the store that installs air conditioners even though I said I would call yesterday Forgive me I’ll call today All right I’ll call now
  17. https://esham.io/2024/05/2
    May 16, 2024 · original
  18. https://esham.io/2024/05/1
    May 2, 2024 · original
    🖐️ redirect loop 👉 100 gets
  19. https://esham.io/2024/04/2
    Apr 28, 2024 · original
    Wikipedia : The [Fermat polygonal number] theorem is named after Pierre de Fermat, who stated it, in 1638, without proof, promising to write it in a separate work that never appeared. The guy definitely had a signature move.
  20. The best thing about living in California
    Apr 28, 2024 · original
    Carmel Beach It wasn’t the mild weather, or the trendy foods, or how my habit of arriving two minutes late to every meeting—a professional liability back on the East Coast—suddenly meant that I was always the first one there. No: it was the fact that California is not only the first U.S. state alphabetically whose name starts with C, but also the first state whose abbreviation starts with C. Which means that when I put my address into an online form, I was able to select my state from the dropdown menu using only the keyboard, with one keystroke, almost every time. Try this for New York—you might need to type “NY” or you might need to type “New Y,” and God only knows what will happen when you try to type that space. But none of that was an issue in California. I just typed “C,” and—eureka!

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