Kothar Labs: writing, projects and products by Mike Houston

Products

CSView 2

Native macOS viewer for multi-gigabyte CSV files. Opens in seconds and indexes in the background.

  • macOS
  • Mac App Store
  • £1.99

Ditto

Copy Asana projects between workspaces: tasks, subtasks, attachments, custom fields and assignees.

  • Web
  • Free
  • Maintenance

Latest posts

  • 5 min read

Managing Multiple Git Identities with Conditional Includes

If you contribute to both internal and client Git repositories - or juggle multiple client projects - keeping your commit authors and SSH credentials in order can get messy fast. Thankfully, Git offers a powerful feature to help with that: conditional includes. In this post, I’ll walk through how I use this approach to keep my Git identity and credentials scoped correctly depending on the project folder.

  • 11 min read

MacOS Catalina — Notarization and App Store Signing with Java 11

With the release of macOS Catalina (10.15) there have been some changes to the way software needs to be signed. In particular, Apple has introduced a new Notarization service which allows developers to pre-register the digital signature of an application so that it can be later checked by the operating system when a user downloads software outside the App Store. I took this as a good opportunity to update to Java 11, and the rest of this article covers the changes I've needed to make to the packaging process.

Writing

2026

  1. Getting my grocery receipts into ChatGPT the long way round

2025

  1. Managing Multiple Git Identities with Conditional Includes

2019

  1. MacOS Catalina — Notarization and App Store Signing with Java 11
  2. Streaming multipart HTTP requests in Go

2017

  1. Generic Adapters in Go

2015

  1. Backblaze B2 Performance Part 2
  2. Backblaze B2 and Go

2013

  1. Organise Asana Projects
  2. File sync and cloud storage client comparison
  3. Plex, SSL and Nginx

2012

  1. Resampling for fun and profit
    • Dynamic Disqus Instantiation

    2011

    1. Spotify for Linux media keys with DBUS
    2. Lock-Free IPC

      2009

      1. Enabling IMAP SSL and TLS encryption for mail-notifier under Ubuntu
        • Shorter Bash Prompts

        2008

        1. Brief introduction to PolyORB