Me

I’m Henry Mercer, a software engineer who works with Mac OS X, iOS, and the web. I started out working with PHP and MySQL before dabbling with Python and Ruby. In 2011, I began to learn Objective-C and I recently released my first iOS app, Flickr Flow. Occasionally, I share code on GitHub and share news on Twitter. I also post pictures to Flickr and scrobble to my last.fm profile. If you want to get in touch, please e-mail me or mention me on Twitter.

Software

This blog is generated whenever I write a new post or update it otherwise by Jekyll. I wrote about switching to Jekyll in July 2011 and have been enjoying it ever since. To edit this blog, I use TextMate and git. The blog is pushed to my servers using Gitolite and Rake, then minified with Mince and HTMLCompressor. The site is run by Varnish and Apache. I use iStat Server and Collectd with Visage to monitor my server, and use Prompt on my iPad and iPod touch to remotely SSH into it. I wrote about securing SSH on my server, and am contributing to the DenyHosts statistics. Talking of statistics, stats are tracked by Mint and viewed on my iPod touch with Ego.

Hardware

• To serve this website, I use a 2010 Mac Mini Server. This is equipped with a 2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, two 1TB hard drives, and 4GB of RAM.
• To write blog posts, I use a Late 2008 MacBook, with a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, a 512GB Crucial m4 SSD and 4GB of RAM. Sometimes, I write posts from my iPod touch and iPad.

Web Standards

This site uses CSS3 and HTML5. The HTML, CSS and feed should all validate. This site will not render well in versions of Internet Explorer below 9. I urge users with outdated browsers to update them or choose a more modern browser.