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Life in 2019.

2019-09-19T00:00:00+02:00

hello again. I accidentally let my blog’s domain expire, then my closet server died, then my google cloud copy of it had an expired card and got deleted, while life happened around me. then I sat next to tobias ahlin a few years ago and he convinced me to switch to jekyll. (he reaaalllly loves jekyll.) I started migrating from tumblr, left it without even pushing to github… unhappy about formatting, tried again a year later… and so on.

a year later, the wonderful ted valentin took the whole office with him into the archipelago (including us on parental leave!!) this week, and I got to sit next to tobias again so he could coach me into finish this thing :)

so here we are at nevyn.me. yay, I got a blog again! I’m not really the same person I was in 2015/2016, so I wanted to reboot the blog with a summary of my recent journey. maybe just for a bit of catharsis.

2015: holy shit how did I survive that.

yeah, that was a year alright.

me and my girlfriend of 9 years broke up. a few months later, my dad passed away. while the breakup was pretty mutual and it was nice to change things up, combining the two made me sort of lose myself.

after a long, intense summer, I met my to-be wife Emma at a music festival. the connection was amazing, and we sorta never let go of each other after that.

then my mom passed away too.

then lookback decided to move to silicon valley.

then me and emma got married so we could move there together and continue being ridiculously in love.

that’s…. just too much stuff to go into a single year. i recommend portioning out the good and the bad across a longer period of time, if you can.

lookback goes usa

two and a half years in san francisco, living the startup life. the world grew, I gained a bunch of amazing friends, and I worked myself apart.

san francisco is an amazing city, with such vibrant communities all being destroyed by a selfish, greedy tech industry. biking past four homeless tent camps, and some of the riches companies in the world on my way to work… made me very sad and bitter, broke me a bit.

combine the losses of 2015 while being half a world away from my family, with overworking myself under a not-so-healthy classic startup tech culture, with the broken city around me… it didn’t feel great.

regardless, I made some really great friends. I miss you brian, bruno, kerstin, kristy, bogo, tarjei, aurora, chris, tiff, phil, carolyn, julia, caro, nehal, alex, lea…

family

so emma got a job back in stockholm, so we moved back to sweden. phew. for the two and a half years since the move, it’s been all about different variants of family.

being near my siblings again and meeting them regularly is worth everything to me. it’s an amazing solace. my youngest brother bengan is my closest friend, and being with him is the best.

we reworked our company culture under the amazing henrik, focused on health and human values, slowed down a lot and… started becoming really successful, perhaps much thanks to these new values?? that made me really happy. using the term “family” for work is a common silicon valley dark pattern, but let’s call it… family-like?

I started working from ted valentin’s coworking space knackeriet, and it’s the friendliest place on earth. every single person there is now a dear friend. it’s like a . .. . second family. really, you’re all lovely!!

and in 2018/2019, the actual family of me and emma become a family of three, as our son Theodor joined us ❤❤ they’re my world, especially now as I’m on paternity leave. from july this year until march of 2020, being a dad is my day job.

it’s a lot of work, in a very different way from startup life; but it’s a really welcome change of pace, and being there with my son as he grows up is such an amazing journey ❤❤

hacks, bits and bobs

while parental leave is really not very easy to combine with coding, I’m ridiculously hyped about VR nowadays, so I try to sneak some hacking in. me, tobias kask and admir husovic organize vr the people, a social evening hack hangout group in stockholm for learning VR and working on side projects. it’s a lot of fun :)

and while I do build various retro gaming inspired toys for my son, the project I try to focus on in the few hours a month I actually have time and space to code is alloverse, an overly ambitious VR app platform thatäs been brewing in the back of my head for a long time. I don’t get very far on my own, but some friends are tagging a long, and it’s open source, so it’s getting somewhere :)

so… that’s my life in 2019! let me know on twitter if you enjoyed reading about it, or there’s something in particular you’d want me to blog about:)

Introducing CoreDragon: cross-application drag’n’drop for iPad

2016-01-14T04:23:30+01:00

I am very passionate about user experience design with direct manipulation. With the advent of multitouch, we have freed ourselves of the computer mouse, and the disconnected interaction of hand movement from cursor movement. Being able to directly touch what we interact with is a great victory, and the major reason why iOS is such an intuitive platform. However, in the design of the iPad, Apple has retained many of the design decisions that were made for a tiny mobile phone, where one can only do one thing at a time. This leads to a lot of modal interactions and sequences of single finger taps, such as the activity view controller, where the entire application is blocked by a modal interaction that you complete by tapping through tedious steps.

The eighties solved this with another piece of direct manipulation: drag and drop. Today, I bring the eighties right back into 2016 with my new open source library CoreDragon . CoreDragon lets you get rid of context menus, modal interactions and even copy paste, by allowing you to mark some areas of your application as things that can be dragged; and other areas as places where you can drop things.

See the video above for a full demo with two sample apps.

nerdsandgamersftw a working bmo super nintendo

2015-03-19T17:16:27+01:00

nerdsandgamersftw:

A Working BMO Super Nintendo Emulator
3D print designer Mike Barretta built this amazing BMO emulator using an assortment of 3D printed pieces and Super Nintendo buttons, as well as a mixture of electronic equipment. To see this emulator in action, check out the play test of Donkey Kong Country.
You can learn to build your own BMO Emulator via Matt’s Thingiverse. Instructions, needed parts, 3D print files and everything else you need to know can be found on his page. Finally you can have your very own BMO!

The beauty of NSError

2015-03-02T08:19:53+01:00

Brent Simmons in Init Question:

Let’s say you have an object where initWithSomething could fail due to bad inputs or other error.

Let’s also say that, if it fails, an error should probably be presented to the user.

Brent lists a number of different options. In Programming with Objective-C, there is a golden rule to error handling in ObjC:

If it is a programmer error, use exceptions/assertions.
If it is any other kind of error, use NSError.

This is yet another one of those genius API design decisions that I just love with ObjC. It’s consistent, sane and available everywhere. It leaves very little room for bikeshedding, while still being very convenient to work with most circumstances.

This also eliminates option 4, as it uses assertions for a user/environment error, which would leave your app unusable without any obvious way of fixing it if anything is even slightly wrong. Danger! Don’t do that!

Of the remaining alternatives, I would definitely opt for #1: a failable constructor with in-out NSError parameter. There’s tons of precedent all over Foundation/AppKit/UIKit for this pattern, e g:

-[NSData initWithContentsOfURL:options:error:]
-[NSString initWithContentsOfURL:encoding:error:]
-[NSXMLDocument initWithXMLString:options:error:]

Displaying errors

A very “convenient” option is to just display errors where they happen, and not propagate them. This breaks MVC, and means that your model will likely be too coupled to how the data is displayed, and makes it hard to test and reuse. Make sure to propagate errors up to your controller layer before they’re displayed; either through direct calls and in-out parameters, or delegate protocols. I often have protocols with almost only an “I failed with this error” method.

So, if you’re displaying errors so far from their source, how do you handle them and gracefully get back to a working state, if that working state depends on user interaction? NSError actually solved this problem rather beautifully back on Mac OS, but the whole infrastructure for this wasn’t ported down to iOS: only some bits of pieces followed along. Use these!

You have probably used NSLocalizedDescriptionKey when you’ve constructed your own NSErrors, which is like a ‘subject line’ for the error. There are many more keys you can use to customize errors! There is also NSLocalizedFailureReasonErrorKey, which is like the 'message body’ of the error. NSLocalizedRecoverySuggestionErrorKey lets you tell your user how they could resolve this invonvenient situation. NSUnderlyingErrorKey is very interesting for other programmers: telling them what caused this error in the first place, if that’s available.

But it gets better! The key NSLocalizedRecoveryOptionsErrorKey lets you provide an NSArray of named options for how to solve the error. These are like the button titles of a dialog. You couple it with NSRecoveryAttempterErrorKey, which is any object that conforms to the informal protocol NSErrorRecoveryAttempting.

Hey, this sounds like you could write some generic code that just displays NSError to a user? With title, subject, buttons and actions. Yeah! This is actually what us old Mac-heads had with -[NSApplication presentError::::]. No such equivalent exists in UIKit, but it is easy to build on your own.

LookbackErrorPresenter is an error presenter for iOS, like the one on built into AppKit on Macs, which I just open sourced for your pleasure. You just give it a well-formed NSError with any or all of the above options, and it will be presented and logged appropriately. Here’s some sample usage, straight from the Lookback sources:

NSURL *url = [_group remoteGroupURL] ?: [NSURL URLWithString:_group.endpointURLString];
LookbackRecoveryAttempter *recovery = [[LookbackRecoveryAttempter alloc] initWithNamesAndCallbacks:
	@"Manage experience", ^BOOL{
		GFOpenURL(url);
		return YES;
	},
	@"Dismiss", ^BOOL{ return NO; },
	nil, nil
];
[[LookbackErrorPresenter presenter] presentError:[NSError errorWithDomain:@"io.lookback" code:-18300 userInfo:@{
	NSLocalizedDescriptionKey: @"Experience already published",
	NSLocalizedFailureReasonErrorKey: @"You can delete or manage this experience via the Lookback website.",
	NSRecoveryAttempterErrorKey: recovery,
	NSLocalizedRecoveryOptionsErrorKey: recovery.recoveryOptions,
}] completion:nil];

My approach in controller level code is to create user-friendly NSErrors, populated with ALL the keys above and a recovery attempter, and just display it straight to the user and let them choose how to resolve the error. I can then also include the underlying error, to let more technical-savvy users understand the technical cause, and as a help to future programmers.

Error handling is very important, and if you have the right toolbox, not particularly hard! Just be vigilant, never ignore an error parameter, and propagate errors to where it can be correctly handled.

Additional resources

RealMac on Cocoa Error Handling and Recovery
My own Three points on error handling

littlebigdetails a gif is used within a post to

2014-10-31T19:42:31+01:00

littlebigdetails — A gif is used within a post to demonstrate how tumblr uses a gif within a post to demonstrate the new changes to the dashboard.

Writing your own jailbreak tweak

2014-02-04T08:47:00+01:00

This article is my raw presentation script from CocoaHeads Stockholm 2014-02. It’s written as if I was talking to an audience, not as a blog article, so it might be a bit weird to read.

Hi! I’m nevyn from Lookback. Whenever Marthin sends panicked emails looking for presenters for next Cocoaheads, I look back through the things I’ve encountered recently looking for something interesting. In other words, I am far from an expert on the upcoming subject, but I find it absolutely fascinating. And the topic is: Jailbreak development. I’m going to try to sneak in a product announcement in here somewhere, so don’t zone out!

What does that even mean? Let’s break it down. Jailbreaking has two parts: There’s a jail, and there’s breaking it. The jail is all the security infrastructure of iOS: a virtual room in which your apps run, and very little bad can happen. This infrastructure includes sandboxing, code signing, NX, ASLR, and so on: a seriously impressive layer-cake of security. All of these pieces work together to make sure that only trusted code can be run on your device—only apps signed by Apple or by you as a developer for your own device—and even if that code is compromised, there is a very limited range of possible consequences; for example, even if you happen to have a buffer overrun vulnerability in your app, a hacker can’t use that bug to install malicious code (like a virus) on your phone.

I could go into details of how all this works, but to allow us to move on, instead I deeply recommend Charlie Miller et al’s iOS Hacker’s Handbook. It’s an excellent guide to both basic security, how to write secure iOS applications, the security infrastructure of both FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and iOS, and how all of those have previously been broken.

That gets us on to the “breaking” in “jailbreaking”. What does “breaking” mean in this context, anyway? Jailbreaking means finding operating system bugs that allow you to expose vulnerabilities by writing exploits to disable every single one of the defenses put in place.

For example, the iOS 7 jailbreak “evasi0n” works like this:

The WWDC 2012 app has code signing that allows it to run anywhere forever. However, it’s still just a normal app within a sandbox, so it can’t make changes to the operating system.
A bug in the way the app installer handles symbolic links allows us to run iOS’s file server instead (used to make backups, normally).
A bug in the dynamic linker allows a flag to completely disable the sandbox. However, we’re still running as the user, not as root, so we can only modify the user’s apps and documents, not the operating system.
A bug in the way the file server handles symbolic links gives us raw access to the harddrive.
And at this point, we can write whatever we want to the disk. The sandbox is completely disabled, allowing us to run any software we want.

This should be scary. This means that on a jailbroken device, a mail attachment could contain a virus, and all the gatekeepers would be asleep: the virus could execute, and it could infect your phone and spread it to all your contacts. Just like on a normal computer.

…

and that’s sort of the point. You own your iPhone. It’s a computer, just like any other. You shouldn’t have to pay Apple *additional* money just to be able to install whatever software you want on it.

And I really mean *whatever* software. On a Mac you can also whatever you want, but there never really sprung up a big community of modders. There was CandyBar, Audio Hijack and a few others.

But on iOS, every jailbreak comes with Cydia, and a whole lot of infrastructure written by Saurik and other awesome hackers. Every piece of the system has a category of modifications on his store. Saurik likes calling “remixing software”, which I think is a great term.

How would one get started with jailbreak development, with remixing software?

Large parts of the jailbreak community is based on the idea that you shouldn’t need a Mac to do development, so they’re based on Makefiles and other traditional Unix development tools. Me, I prefer my GUIs. If you’re like me, you’ll appreciate iOS Open Dev, which is an Xcode plugin package with awesome templates to help you get started. One might think it’s just a bunch of unmaintained scripts (as is often the case with obscure dev communities), but I’ve found it to be very well put together.

After installation, iosopendev might not work right off the bat. If it doesn’t, you might to tell it to use the latest iOS SDK:

iod-setup sdk -d /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer -sdk iphoneos

Restarting Xcode and making a new project now gives a ton of new options. They’re all based on the idea that you want to put code into other people’s apps. Some interesting ones are:

Action Menu Plugin. Always wanted to be able to select text and have an option to make it sparkle? Well, why don’t you build it!
Tweak. A tweak is a plugin that is loaded into apps that aren’t supposed to have plugins. You can make a tweak that loads into every single app, or just into Springboard, which is the app that launches apps and does all the other iOS-y stuff. This is the most interesting one, so I’ll get into more detail on it later.
Activator Listener. A crazy infrastructure which lets you bind any action to any handler. For example, if you make, I dunno, a tweak that lets you record the screen of any app, you might want to add an Activator to it so that the end user can choose which action should start the recording. And it could be ANY action. This is just a small sample. When locking the phone. When triple-tapping the lock button. When inverse five-finger swiping the screen. When dragging in with two fingers from top-right of the screen. You get the point.
Library. Hey look, you can actually make dynamic libraries on iOS!
Tool. And command line tools! It’s as if this is some kind of UNIX operating system!
You can make your own Notification Center widget, just like Weather and Stocks.
Toggles. Before Control Center in iOS 7, jailbreakers enjoyed the same features (and many more) using SBSettings toggles. You can make your own.
XPC Service! Now this is even starting to look like Mac OS X! How odd.

Ok, so before we jump into live coding, I’d like a volunteer app. If you have an app on the AppStore and want to be horrified, yell the app name out loud!

While that’s downloading, let’s make a tweak. Primarily, a tweak is a uniform way of injecting code into apps using a library called Cydia Substrate. It will let you specify which apps you want to inject in, for example by checking for the existence of a class. This filter here will inject into any app that has the hypothetical class SpotifyViewController in it. You can also say “only inject into SpringBoard”, or “into any UIKit app”, or something else.

Once inside the target app, what can you do?

Well, a tweak is also method swizzling made into an art form. To make it really, really easy to swizzle stuff. two optional frameworks have emerged.

Logos is the oldest one, and it is a bit crazy. It’s a custom preprocessor on top of Objective-C with the extension “.x”. You tell it which class you want to swizzle, implement your replacement, and then you can optionally call the original implementation with %orig. It has support for many other things, but I think I’ll leave it at that.

The alternative is CaptainHook, which uses C++ template classes and macros to accomplish the same thing. It’s not less crazy. Here we are logging every call to [NSString writeToFile:], and then calling the original implementation.

So let’s write a very simple tweak. It’ll create a class called “ListClasses” when the app starts, using +load. We’ll wait for the app to finish launching properly before we do anything. At that point, we’ll add a button to the window after a second, to let the UI settle. It’s going to present a custom view controller on top of the app.

This’ll be a table view controller. We will list ALL classes available to the app, and get their names. Then we’ll just list those in a table view. Build and run, aaand… Let’s have a look inside the audience app.

So, these are real class names, and I could instantiate any one of them if I wanted, and call any method I wanted on them.

Class names aren’t quite enough to know what to swizzle though: we want method names, and preferrably, even headers. Luckilly, or unfortunately if you want to keep secrets, Objective-C is very verbose in what kind of information is available at runtime, since it’s such a dynamic language. There’s a tool called class-dump that will take an app or a library, and output headers, much like this. However, all app-store apps are encrypted and aren’t easily class-dumped. First, they must be cracked using a tool using “Clutch”. This is also the same way that apps are pirated, so please don’t do that :(

Let’s do a classdump of the audience app. I will SSH into my phone, as if it was a regular UNIX computer o_O

This is a good time to mention that development on device is going to be very painful if you don’t enable SSH. SSH lets you get a command line shell right into your phone. However, you should change the password immediately after installation, since all iPhones have the same default password: alpine. You’ll also want to add a ssh key to your phone, so that iosopendev can install tweaks onto your phone directly from Xcode. If you add your phone’s IP address to your .bash_profile file, you can press command-shift-I to install tweaks.

You will probably also want the tool deviceconsole, which is like Xcode organizer’s console log, except as a terminal app which means it’s searchable, fast, and just generally awesome in every way that Xcode isn’t.

There’s so much more to talk about. How to publish your creation, how to debug, how to write activators, and much more. However, my time is up so talk to me afterwards if you want to know more.

I’d like to finish off with the tool I built that made me learn all this. You probably saw my previous presentation on Lookback, so now I’d like to show you Lookback Anywhere. Lookback Anywhere is very simple: I’ve taken the Lookback SDK, linked it into a tweak, and added two activator actions. That means Lookback is loaded into every app on your phone, and you can record them without having to install the SDK. The same concept could be applied to any developer tool: Reveal, PonyDebugger, Spark Inspector and others could be installed into any app very easily.

So I’d like to show you here how I can record in this audience app… And voila, it’s uploaded to lookback.io.

Lookback Anywhere is not ready for release, but you can install a beta on your phone by adding a custom source in Cydia.

when I fix one bug

2013-08-01T20:23:40+02:00

thecodinglove:

/* by slai47 */

mastervone welcome program you have only two

2013-08-01T07:31:35+02:00

mastervone:

Welcome, program! You have only two choices: Games, or immediate deresolution! Luckilly, you can bring one or two, or even three of your “friends" onto the Grid. Not so lucky: only one of you will survive.

Gridlike is now available for iPad on the Apple App Store. It’s a two-to-four player lightbike game that we’ve been working on on and off since before Tron: Legacy was released.

We released a game! :D We were basically done with this game after a week-long game hacking lan party three years ago, but weren’t quite happy with the result, and there was this one annoying collision bug we never got around to fixing. Every game making lan party since, we’ve said that we’ll patch it up and release it, but things like CLOP (don’t click.), Candy Box (don’t click!!), Deathtroid (do click!) and just general procrastination got in the way. (We’re horrible procrastinators).

Last week, we had another game making LAN, (chronicled in my dev diary), and managed to both finish up Gridlike and start a new game, Tanks!

We’ve set the price to free for the first week, so go check it out! Let us know if anything’s weird, buggy or boring.

Continuously playing music in the background on iOS

2013-03-28T01:08:00+01:00

tl;dr: Have an active background task and audio session running continously whenever the user is semantically playing music, so code can execute while empty buffers are being refilled.

For the longest time since multitasking was introduced in iOS 4, Spotify occasionally had problems with music playback stopping against the user’s wishes. See, iOS applications can only execute in the background when at least one of six conditions are true:

App has background mode “audio” in Info.plist and is playing audio, with a suitable audio category active
Equivalent, but for getting location data
Equivalent, but for talking to external accessories
App is performing magic VoIP voodoo
App is a Newsstand app and is downloading content
App explicitly started a ten minute limited “background task”

If you’re a streaming music service, music to be played in the background won’t always be immediately available. Say your music buffer runs out, your device is on EDGE, and it takes a few seconds to get the music data: silence. Or even if you’re not streaming music, perhaps you need to tear down and set up your audio subsystem in between tracks, e g because they’re different kinds of tracks. What should a well-behaved iOS app do in this situation?

When I realized what the problem is, my first approach was to detect situations when music would not be playing, try to pre-empt them, and start a background task just before music stops playing and then end it when music is back again. If this sounds fragile and stupid to you, you’re absolutely right. I’ve heard other developers come to the same solution, but don’t do it: you’ll miss edge cases, it’ll be buggy, and it’s so overly complex.

The epiphany came when I realized what the audio background mode actually means for background tasks: background tasks become no-ops, with infinite lease time, as long as audio is playing. Only when there is no audio playing does the timer start counting, from ten minutes. Start playing again and the lease is back at infinite time.

The solution is then obvious: whether your app is playing audio is uninteresting. The only interesting information is whether the user currently wants music to play. If she does, start an audio session and a background task, and don’t stop them until the user wants music to stop. In between, it’s up to other subsystems to make sure that audio is playing. With the continous background task, we allow these subsystems to continue to work, even if they can’t play music this very moment. As long as they don’t take playback pauses that are longer than ten minutes, we’re all good.

This is a very simple approach, and should work no matter how your underlying audio playback code works. Below, you can find some sample code implementing my approach.

(If you’re thinking you haven’t seen this problem in Spotify in a long while, you’re right: I wrote this code two years ago and have been thinking I should blog it since then. My apologies for not doing so earlier.)

Thinking alike: await/async in Python 3

2013-03-19T07:30:36+01:00

Thinking alike: await/async in Python 3

Guido van Rossum’s 2013 PyCon keynote presents Python 3.4’s major new feature: coroutines as a language feature for working with asynchronous operations. I wonder where I’ve seen that before? :)

Async/await is such an amazingly simple way to express asynchrony, and I’m very happy to see more languages adopt the thinking. Also, python is *finally finally finally* standardizing on a runloop API. That has been a crazy big gap in the standard libraries and frankly I don’t understand how people have been able to write Python apps without it…

Example python code with the new API below. “yield from” is identical to “await” in C#.

def getresp():
    s = socket()
    yield from loop.sock_connect(s, host, port)
    yield from loop.sock_sendall(s, b'xyzzy')
    data = yield from loop.sock_recv(s, 100)

no title

2013-03-08T17:35:39+01:00

My presentation of Methods of Concurrency at CocoaHeads Stockholm 2013-02. Don’t miss the rest of the talks from that evening!

Methods of concurrency — GCD, agents, tasks and invocations

2013-01-30T06:16:00+01:00

My programmer world was turned up-side down when I first saw the new ’await’ keyword in C# about a year ago, and I’ve wanted to share all the thoughts that arose from that since, but never got around to it.

In the past few evenings, I’ve written some tools that I can’t not share with you, and thus we begin. You can skip the background chapters if you’ve already seen the video linked above. The code is available on Github.

tl;dr (abstract)

tl;dr: Building an application using a GCD queue for every class, simple NSInvocation-based dispatch between threads, and Tasks (stolen from .Net) to get results of asynchronous operations and chaining them together.

This article starts with five chapters on background: in what asynchrony is, how such code gets messy, my favorite solution of pretending there is no problem, how C# generalizes asynchronous operations as ‘tasks’ to gain enormous strength in generalizing asynchronous problems, and the new in C# 5 keywords 'async’ and 'await’.

Then comes five chapters on my own creations: I replicate C#’s Task in Objective-C as the basic building block for everything else, and delve into its implementation. Then I move all my classes onto their own GCD work queues and call them 'agents’. I go through invocation grabbers again, because I use them to simplifly cross-thread communication with sp_agentAsync together with SPTask. Finally I delve into the implementation of sp_agentAsync.

In the summary, this code is disected, and hopefully by then, you will understand every part of it:

- (SPTask*)funkifyImageAndPublishResult:(NSURL*)link
{
	return [[[[[_backendService sp_agentAsync] requestURL:url] chain] then:^ id (NSData *response) {
		UIImage *image = [UIImage imageFromData:response];
		return [image funkyTransform];
	} on:dispatch_get_global_queue(0,0)] chain:^ SPTask*(UIImage *image) {
		return [_imageHostingService postImageAndReturnImageURL:image];
	} on:_imageHostingService.workQueue];
}

What is asynchrony, anyway?

Just to make things clear, let’s sort asynchrony into three categories:

Background computation. Anything that is too time consuming to do inline in whatever other code needs it. Building an image, doing a large database query, processing audio, expensive cryptography…
I/O. Accessing resources that are slower than RAM, such as disk or network.
Events. Things happen from outside your app that you can’t predict, such as touch events, keyboard input, wifi becomes available, or even value changes on objects you are interested in (i e KVO).

Asynchronous code gets messy

If at all possible, many programmers choose to tackle asynchrony by opting out of it entirely. In some cases, this way of doing networking is acceptable:

while(true) {
	var imageLength = toInt(read(socket, 2));
	var image = read(socket, imageLength);
	var mirroredImage = mirrorImage(image)
	write(socket, length(mirroredImage))
	write(socket, mirroredImage)
}

If that code is part of UI, or needs to do any other thing than the above, the entire paradigm becomes unacceptable. A network read might take minutes, and image processing isn’t cheap, either.

Over the years, many patterns have emerged to deal with asynchrony. Some of them are, in rough order of evolution:

Function callbacks and delegates
Closure callbacks
Promises and futures
Coroutines
Synchronous-looking code (gevent, async+await)

#2 is quite popular in Objective-C, as we have GCD (mikeash plug!) to help us out, and GCD is closure based. However, if you’re not careful, your code will end up looking like this:

- (void)handleOneRequest;
{
	// async I/O
	[socket readUInt32ToCompletion:^(uint32_t length) {
		[socket readToLength:length completion:^(NSData *data) {
			dispatch_async(dispatch_get_global_queue(0,0) {
				// async processing
				UIImage *image = [UIImage imageFromData:data];
				UIImage *mirrored = [image mirror];
				NSData *pngBytes = [image pngData];
				[socket writeUInt32:pngBytes.length completion:^ {
					[socket writeData:pngBytes completion:^{
						[self handleOneRequest];
					}];
				}];
			});
		}];
	}];
}

Yuck. And it gets way worse when you add error handling. The same level of asynchrony using either callbacks or delegates could get almost as messy. So, instead…

Let’s pretend that there is no problem

Gevent is a popular Python library among Spotify backend developers, and one that fascinates me. Gevent enforces cooperative multithreading on process-level threads (“green threads”), suspending execution when anyone does a blocking call. You can think of it as methods becoming coroutines, yielding whenever it would block. By patching system libraries, the following code, which looks synchronous, actually becomes asynchronous.

def print_head(url):
    print ('Starting %s' % url)
    data = urllib2.urlopen(url).read()
    print ('%s: %s bytes: %r' % (url, len(data), data[:50]))

jobs = [gevent.spawn(print_head, url) for url in urls]

The above code code will fetch all the headers at the URLs in 'urls’ almost simultaneously. The implementation of 'print_head’ pays no attention to asynchrony at all, and looks completely asynchronous. The problem has become invisible. That this is possible using just a library is a testament to the flexibility of Python.

C# 5 has new features to try to reach the same level of invisibility. They have been designed to be a little more explicit, and are added as the language features 'async’ and 'await’ rather than as a library. But before we can talk about them, we need to introduce the older concept of Tasks.

Tasks

First, we realize that we can probably generalize the concept of “do something and notify me when it’s done”. One such generalization is the future/promise (obligatory mikeash plug), but it seems that there are many situations in which they will block, which is unacceptable for UI code.

In .Net, every asynchronous action is instead wrapped in a System.Threading.Tasks.Task. At its core, Task is almost a value class, just holding callbacks to be called when an operation is done, seemingly so trivial that it’s not even worth an abstraction. But once you have that abstraction, you can throw so many things at it. To enumerate a few in .Net:

Generic cancellation of operations

Shorthand for performing things in the background

Getting a callback when the operation completes

Waiting synchronously for the operation to complete

Chaining tasks together, with the later ones depending on the result of the earlier ones

Waiting for several tasks together (e g for an operation that depends on many separate non-interdependent things)

Delaying

C#: Async and await

Back to fancy language features. In C#, the ’async’ keyword will transform a method into a special coroutine. The ’await’ keyword is basically a coroutine ’yield’. Let’s take this (slightly fictitious) synchronous code:

private byte[] GetURLContents(string url) {
	var content = new MemoryStream();

	HttpWebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(url);
	WebResponse response = request.GetResponse(); // <-- network call, blocks!

	Stream responseStream = response.GetResponseStream();
	responseStream.copyTo(content); // <-- network call, blocks!

	return content.ToArray();
}

… and turn it asynchronous:

private async Task<byte[]> GetURLContents(string url) {
	var content = new MemoryStream();
	HttpWebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(url);

	WebResponse response = await request.GetResponseAsync(); // <-- yields and returns from this method!
	Stream responseStream = response.GetResponseStream();

	await responseStream.copyToAsync(content); // <-- yields and returns from this method!
	return content.ToArray();
}

Note the slight changes, highlighted in bold. Making a method ’async’ means that instead of returning the value, it returns a task representing the future delivery of that value. Since the caller now has a task, we have all eternity to perform the requested action, and will never block the caller.

We can pretend that the method has been cut into three pieces: the part before the first await keyword, the part between the first and second await keyword, and the part after the second await keyword. We have a chain of three Tasks. Since I don’t really know C#, the language I will use below does not exist:

private Task<byte[]> GetURLContentsAsync(string url)
{
	var content = new MemoryStream();
	HttpWebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(url);
	
	Task<WebResponse> responseTask = request.GetResponseAsync();
	Task task2 = responseTask.startAndCallback(^(WebResponse response) {
		Stream responseStream = response.GetResponseStream();
		
		Task copyTask = responseStream.CopyToAsync(content);
		Task<byte[]> bytesTask = copyTask.startAndCallback(^ {
			return content.ToArray();
		});
		return bytesTask;
	};
	return task2;
}

This method contains three explicit tasks rather than implicit, and they are chained together, one starting when the previous one completes; and the method returns the first task in the chain, that sets it all off.

Let’s face it, Objective-C is no C#: replicating the Task class in ObjC

It seems that Apple felt they were done once GCD was out the door. Indeed, GCD is an amazing library, but it only helps us with where to execute our code, not with higher level questions like “how do I compose these operations” or even “how do I know when the work is done”?, nor does it try to. Microsoft has upped the game, and I hope Apple follows (and surpasses, of course).

Until then, we make do with the tools we have. Before C# 5, .Net programmers had to make do without language support for asynchrony. The Task class achieves this with the “continueWith” method. This is a perfect recipe for something to replicate in our language of choice, and thus I built SPTask in the same vein. Let’s try out its header:

typedef void(^SPTaskCallback)(id value);
typedef void(^SPTaskErrback)(NSError *error);
typedef id(^SPTaskThenCallback)(id value);
typedef SPTask*(^SPTaskChainCallback)(id value);

/** @class SPTask
    @abstract Any asynchronous operation that someone might want to know the result of.
 */
@interface SPTask : NSObject

/** @method addCallback:on:
    Add a callback to be called async when this task finishes, including the queue to
    call it on. If the task has already finished, the callback will be called immediately
    (but still asynchronously)
    @return self, in case you want to add more call/errbacks on the same task */
- (instancetype)addCallback:(SPTaskCallback)callback on:(dispatch_queue_t)queue;

/** @method addErrback:on:
    Like callback, but for when the task fails 
    @return self, in case you want to add more call/errbacks on the same task */
- (instancetype)addErrback:(SPTaskErrback)errback on:(dispatch_queue_t)queue;

/** @method then:on:
    Add a callback, and return a task that represents the return value of that
    callback. Useful for doing background work with the result of some other task.
    This task will fail if the parent task fails, chaining them together.
    @return A new task to be executed when 'self' completes, representing
            the work in 'worker'
 */
- (instancetype)then:(SPTaskThenCallback)worker on:(dispatch_queue_t)queue;

/** @method chain:on:
    Add a callback that will be used to provide further work to be done. The
    returned SPTask represents this work-to-be-provided.
    @return A new task to be executed when 'self' completes, representing
            the work provided by 'worker'
  */
- (instancetype)chain:(SPTaskChainCallback)chainer on:(dispatch_queue_t)queue;

...
@end

/** @class SPTaskCompletionSource
    Task factory for a single task that the caller knows how to complete/fail.
  */
@interface SPTaskCompletionSource : NSObject
/** The task that this source can mark as completed. */
- (SPTask*)task;

/** Signal successful completion of the task to all callbacks */
- (void)completeWithValue:(id)value;
/** Signal failed completion of the task to all errbacks */
- (void)failWithError:(NSError*)error;
@end

If the only method we had on SPTask was addCallback:, we would still be in the ’yuck’ situation from above. ’then:’ and ’chain:’ to the rescue! They lets us write code that looked just like the await code in C#, except it’s indented one level:

- (SPTask*)getURLContents(NSURL *URL) {
    NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:URL];
    
    return [[request sp_getResponse] chain:^ SPTask *(NSURLResponse *response) ^{
        return [response sp_readDataUntilEOF];
    }];
}

The signature of the hypothetical sp_getResponse would be -(SPTask/*<NSURLResponse>*/)sp_getResponse; (yes, I’m still pretending that Objective-C has generics). It’s a method that immediately returns an SPTask, that when completes will yield an NSURLResponse to its callbacks. We use this task to chain it together with a new operation. When we get the response (that represents just the headers, not the whole data response), we know that we will immediately want to start reading the entire HTTP payload into an NSData object. The signature of the hypothetical sp_readDataUntilEOF would be -(SPTask/*<NSData>*/)sp_readDataUntilEOF;. Returning the ’readData…’ Task from the ’chain:’ block creates a new SPTask that represents the whole chain of getResponse > response done > request data > data has arrived. The caller of getURLContents can now add a callback to the SPTask she receives, and get the full data contents of the URL.

When comparing this code to the C# example, each ’return’ is equivalent to a C# ’await’, because we have chopped the method up into smaller blocks, manually creating a coroutine (a method that can be resumed from where it last left off).

Let’s look at an involved example.

- (SPTask*)handleOneRequest
{
    __block NSData *pngBytes;
    return [[[[socket readUInt32] chain:^(NSNumber *length) {
        return [socket readToLength:[length intValue]];
    }] chain:^(NSData *imageData) {
        UIImage *image = [UIImage imageFromData:data];
        UIImage *mirrored = [image mirror];
        pngBytes = [image pngData];
        return [socket writeUInt32:pngBytes.length];
    } on:dispatch_get_global_queue(0,0)] addCallback:^(id _) {
        [socket writeData:pngBytes];
    }];
}

This example has the exact same level of asynchrony as ’yuck’, but because we can chain instead of nest, the method is much more readable. Let’s look at the calling side.

[[[self handleOneRequest] addCallback:^(id _) {
    [self doMoreStuff];
}] addErrback:^(NSError *err) {
    NSLog(@"Error handling the request! %@", err);
}];

Since exceptions aren’t used the way they are in C#, I had to steal 'errbacks’ from the python framework Twisted. They work like the normal 'callback’, except it’s called when an error happens. Chaining together tasks will also chain together errors, so in the case of handleOneRequest, errors will be propagated all the way up to the caller.

Delving into SPTask

SPTask is such a simple class that we might as well take a closer look at it.

@interface SPTask ()
{
    NSMutableArray *_callbacks;
    NSMutableArray *_errbacks;
    BOOL _isCompleted;
    id _completedValue;
    NSError *_completedError;
}

@end

@implementation SPTask
- (id)init
{
    if(!(self = [super init]))
        return nil;
    _callbacks = [NSMutableArray new];
    _errbacks = [NSMutableArray new];
    return self;
}

We track all callbacks, errbacks, and whether this task has finished.

- (instancetype)addCallback:(SPTaskCallback)callback on:(dispatch_queue_t)queue
{
    @synchronized(_callbacks) {
        if(_isCompleted) {
            if(!_completedValue) {
                dispatch_async(queue, ^{
                    callback(_completedValue);
                });
            }
        } else {
            [_callbacks addObject:[[SPCallbackHolder alloc] initWithCallback:callback onQueue:queue]];
        }
    }
    return self;
}

- (instancetype)addErrback:(SPTaskErrback)errback on:(dispatch_queue_t)queue
{
    @synchronized(_errbacks) {
        if(_isCompleted) {
            if(_completedError) {
                dispatch_async(queue, ^{
                    errback(_completedError);
                });
            }
        } else {
            [_errbacks addObject:[[SPCallbackHolder alloc] initWithCallback:errback onQueue:queue]];
        }
    }
    return self;
}

If the task has already finished, we call the callback immediately with the value we have stored. Otherwise, we store it away for later. We also return self, so that we can chain more calls onto it, such as an errback, of if the caller is returning it to another piece of code that also want to know about this task’s completion.

- (instancetype)then:(SPTaskThenCallback)worker on:(dispatch_queue_t)queue
{
    SPTaskCompletionSource *source = [SPTaskCompletionSource new];
    SPTask *then = [source task];

’then::’ is the method you would call instead of “addCallback” when you want to add some background work to a chain of tasks. We start off by creating the new task, representing this background work. To show off how to use a completion source (the public API), I create the task through a source rather than directly, although the source just forwards to the private task API.

[self addCallback:^(id value) {

We can’t do that work until we have the result of the current task, so we wait for it with an addCallback.

        id result = worker(value);
        [source completeWithValue:result];
    } on:queue];

Then we start doing the work. We just do it synchronously inline, since we have already been asynchronously dispatched to the requested queue. When we have the result, we complete our new 'then’ task with that value. All the callbacks will now be called for it.

    [self addErrback:^(NSError *error) {
        [source failWithError:error];
    } on:queue];

We also add an errback on self, so that our ’then’ task will fail if the original task fails.

    return then;
}

We’re done! Returning the task to the caller, who can now wait for the background task. Onto the next method.

- (instancetype)chain:(SPTaskChainCallback)chainer on:(dispatch_queue_t)queue
{
    SPTaskCompletionSource *chainSource = [SPTaskCompletionSource new];
    SPTask *chain = [chainSource task];

’chain::’ is the method you would call instead of ’then::’ when what you want to do is to ask someone else to do work with the data from the callback, rather than doing work yourself. The ChainCallback returns a task, which we will be waiting for using the ’chain’ task we create here.

    [self addCallback:^(id value) {
        SPTask *workToBeProvided = chainer(value);

When ’self’ is done generating its value, we ask the callback for the task we should wait for.

        [workToBeProvided addCallback:^(id value) {
            [chainSource completeWithValue:value];

We add a callback to this new task, and use the new ’chain’ task we created at the beginning of the method to signal its completion.

        } on:queue];
        [workToBeProvided addErrback:^(NSError *error) {
            [chainSource failWithError:error];
        } on:queue];

If the work-to-be-provided fails, we fail the whole chain.

    } on:queue];
    [self addErrback:^(NSError *error) {
        [chainSource failWithError:error];
    } on:queue];

If self fails, we fail the whole chain too.

    return chain;
}

We now have a task to return to the caller, that represents the completion of both ’self’, and the task provided from the callback.

- (instancetype)chain
{
    return [self chain:^SPTask *(id value) {
        return value;
    } on:dispatch_get_global_queue(0, 0)];
}

’chain’ is just a convenience method for when the value this task yields is itself is a task. We will talk about it in depth later on.

- (void)completeWithValue:(id)value
{
    @synchronized(_callbacks) {
        _isCompleted = YES;
        _completedValue = value;
        for(SPCallbackHolder *holder in _callbacks) {
            dispatch_async(holder.callbackQueue, ^{
                holder.callback(value);
            });
        }
        [_callbacks removeAllObjects];
        [_errbacks removeAllObjects];
    }
}

completeWithValue: is exposed by SPTaskCompletionSource, not Task itself, but this is the implementation that will be called. It simply dispatches the requested callback to the requested queue, with the value that we completed the task with. It also saves the value into _completedValue, in case someone adds a callback to the task after it has finished (see addCallback:: to see how this is done).

- (void)failWithError:(NSError*)error
{
    @synchronized(_errbacks) {
        _isCompleted = YES;
        _completedError = error;
        for(SPCallbackHolder *holder in _errbacks) {
            dispatch_async(holder.callbackQueue, ^{
                holder.callback(error);
            });
        }
        [_callbacks removeAllObjects];
        [_errbacks removeAllObjects];
    }
}
@end

The same goes for errbacks, except we save the error rather than the value.

In the previous chapter, I ignored the ’on:’ argument on the Task methods, and didn’t really focus on it in this chapter. Let’s take a detour from task abstractions and talk about Grand Central Dispatch, before getting back to it.

It’s queues all the way down: Agents and work queues.

My day job is writing code for some streaming music company. My main annoyance with that product is that it stops and thinks too much (although not nearly as often as iTunes, phew!), doing too much work on the main thread. When working on my latest pet project, my counter reaction is thus to make sure no part of my system blocks any other part in a synchronous manner. Thus, SPAgent was born:

/**
 Experimental multithreading primitive: An object conforming to SPAgent is not thread safe,
 but it runs in its own thread. To perform any of the methods on it, you must first dispatch to its
 workQueue.
 */
@protocol SPAgent <NSObject>
@property(nonatomic,readonly) dispatch_queue_t workQueue;
@end

Any object conforming to the SPAgent protocol is thus communicating that you MUST NOT call any method on it from any other queue than its workQueue, which is a private GCD dispatch queue that it owns and on which it does all its work. We are thereby externalizing synchronization to the caller, letting the caller use whatever method is most appropriate at that call point. It feels like such a bad idea to externalize what feels like an implementation detail like that, but so far I’m very pleased with the pattern. It’s very Erlang-y, a language where you do all major communication between “objects” as messages between processes, even as a part of the language syntax. The implementation of an agent is also very clean: you don’t have to do any locking anywhere, and you are guaranteed that only one method is being called at a time, so it’s very easy to reason about the internal state of your object.

Let’s explore an example.

    MasterControlProgram *mcp = [MasterControlProgram new];
    dispatch_async([mcp workQueue], ^{
        int leetAnswer = [mcp multiplicatify:42 with:1337];
        dispatch_async([self workQueue], ^{
            NSString *prettyThingForUI = [self ingestAnswer:leetAnswer];
            dispatch_async(dispatch_get_main_queue(), ^{
                [ui show:prettyThingForUI];
            })
        })
    });

Well! This looks familiar. Dispatch queue spaghetti. What can we do about that? I decided to use invocation grabbers.

NSInvocation refresher

To refresh, NSInvocation is a Foundation class that encapsulates calling a method on an object. It can hold onto a target, a selector, a method signature (description of each argument and return value of a method), every argument of a call, and the return value. They are the building block that enables call forwarding and proxies to work. You can either create them manually, or have one created for you by implementing -forwardInvocation:, where one will be handed to you as an argument. In the latter case, you can use it immediately, but you can also store it and invoke it later.

Creating invocations manually is a hassle. Therefore, it is common to create an “invocation grabber”, that is an object that will save the first unknown call being made on it, and then let the caller use the grabber in some manner. There are many open source grabbers, but this is the one I have:

@interface SPInvocationGrabber : NSObject
-(id)initWithObject:(id)obj stacktraceSaving:(BOOL)saveStack;
@property (readonly, retain, nonatomic) id object;
@property (readonly, retain, nonatomic) NSInvocation *invocation;
...
-(void)invoke; // will release object and invocation
@end

You would use it like so:

    id someObject;
    SPInvocationGrabber *grabber = [[SPInvocationGrabber alloc] initWithObject:someObject stacktraceSaving:NO];
    [grabber doThatThingWith:anArgument];
    NSInvocation *invocation = [grabber invocation];

You now have an invocation that you can call now, or later, with a reference to ’someObject’, the method ’doThatThingWith:’, and anArgument. You can optionally ask the invocation to retain all the arguments (it’s not done by default to save some overhead in case you use the invocation immediately).

With some NSObject categories, you can have fun with higher-order messaging without closures:

@interface NSObject (SPInvocationGrabbing)
-(id)invokeAfter:(NSTimeInterval)delta;
-(id)inBackground;
-(id)onMain;
@end

// Example: blink
[[self invokeAfter:0.2] setSelected:YES animated:YES]
[[self invokeAfter:0.4] setSelected:NO animated:YES]

// Example: Background computation with UI update later
- ... {
    [[self inBackground] somethingExpensive];
}
- (void)somethingExpensive {
    ...
    [[button onMain] setTitle:computedTitle forState:0];
}

Simplifying agent communication with Invocations

We can extend this concept to add a category on NSObject to dispatch to its workQueue, given that it’s an SPAgent:

@interface NSObject (SPAgentDo)
- (instancetype)sp_agentAsync;
@end

// Example
- ... {
    [[_backendService sp_agentAsync] requestURL:someURL whenDone:^(id _){ ... } callbackQueue:_workQueue];
}

This simplifies communication to the agent, but not back: taking the return value of requestURL:whenDone:callbackQueue: wouldn’t make sense, as it’s not actually being called on that line, but being scheduled to be called later. If only we had a concept representing future values…!

sp_agentAsync returns an invocation grabber, but what does the call on the invocation grabber return? An SPTask representing the real return value. Example:

- foo {
    SPTask *dataTask = [[_backendService sp_agentAsync] requestURL:someURL];
    [dataTask addCallback:^ (NSData *data) {
        // Do something with the newly acquired data
    } on:_workQueue];
}

This also highlights why every SPTask method takes a queue in addition to the callback to be run: We certainly don’t want to run the callback on the work queue of _backendService, and since we’re communicating between agents, we don’t want to call the callback on the main queue. dispatch_get_current_queue() looks inviting, but the documentation states that it should only be used when you are the creator of the queue the call is executed from. Thus, we always need to be explicit about the destination queue.

Delving into sp_agentAsync

The implementation of sp_agentAsync is interesting enough to take a closer look at.

@implementation NSObject (SPAgentDo)
- (instancetype)sp_agentAsync
{
    SPInvocationGrabber *grabber = [self grabWithoutStacktrace];
    __weak SPInvocationGrabber *weakGrabber = grabber;

The general use case of invocation grabbers is to use them seldom, therefore I added a stack trace saving feature to them, to aid in finding the origin of bugs. Agents communicate often, so we want to keep the overhead down here.

    SPTaskCompletionSource *completionSource = [SPTaskCompletionSource new];
    SPTask *task = completionSource.task;
    __block void *unsafeTask = (__bridge void *)(task);

When you return a Task from a method, the caller of that method shouldn’t be able to decide on the completion state of it: that’s a task for the creator of the task. To hide those method from the Task API, a CompletionSource is used for that purpose.

    grabber.afterForwardInvocation = ^{
        NSInvocation *invocation = [weakGrabber invocation];

We have just now created the grabber, but not returned it from this method, so we don’t know what method it will grab yet. Thus, we need a time in the future when the invocation has been grabbed: that’s what this callback provides us with.

        // Let the caller get the result of the invocation as a task.
        // Block guarantees lifetime of 'task', so just bridge it here.
        BOOL hasObjectReturn = strcmp([invocation.methodSignature methodReturnType], @encode(id)) == 0;
        if(hasObjectReturn)
            [invocation setReturnValue:&unsafeTask];

We only want to return a Task representing the return value if the method we’re wrapping returns a value of object type. If it does, we artificially set the SPTask as the return value of the invocation, which is what provides the caller with the task.

        dispatch_async([(id)self workQueue], ^{
#pragma clang diagnostic push
#pragma clang diagnostic ignored "-Warc-retain-cycles"
            // "invoke" will break the cycle, and the block must hold on to grabber
            // until this moment so that it survives (nothing else is holding the grabber)
            [grabber invoke];
#pragma clang diagnostic pop

Dispatch to the work queue of the target, and invoke the grabber’s invocation on that thread. In this weird case we actually want a retain cycle: the grabber should live until the dispatch to the new thread is done. This is similar to how NSTimer retains its target. Invoking the grabber will set its ’afterForwardInvocation’ to nil, thus breaking the cycle and cleaning everything up.

            if(hasObjectReturn) {
                __unsafe_unretained id result = nil;
                [invocation getReturnValue:&result];
                [completionSource completeWithValue:result];
            }

The invocation has now been populated with an actual return value. We can extract it, and complete our SPTask with that value. This value will now be propagated back to the original queue/thread, if a callback was set on the SPTask.

        });
    };
    return grabber;
}
@end

And we’re done! The grabber is returned to the caller, ready to begin the whole dispatch chain.

Summary

We can now go back to the example in the tl;dr and step through it, hopefully with full understanding of what’s going on.

@interface BackendService : NSObject <SPAgent>
- (SPTask*/*<NSData>*/)requestURL:(NSURL*)url;
@end

- (SPTask*)funkifyImageAndPublishResult:(NSURL*)link
{
	return [[[[[_backendService sp_agentAsync] requestURL:url] chain] then:^ id (NSData *response) {

We have a _backendService, which is an SPAgent. Therefore, we know we can’t just call requestURL directly on it: we need to be on its work queue first. We use sp_agentAsync to do that.

Note that by doing so, the return value is actually SPTask<SPTask<NSData>>; that is, a task which yields a task which yields an NSData. To get to the NSData, we need to wait for the first task to complete. This is a common situation, and thus we can use the convenience method ’chain’. Remember that ’chain:on:’ adds a callback that provides more work to wait for. ’chain’ is a shorthand for ’…] chain:^ (SPTask *task) { return task; } on:_workQueue]’. We’re saying, “the task yields a task. Just give me the latter when it’s ready”.

		UIImage *image = [UIImage imageFromData:response];
		return [image funkyTransform];
	} on:dispatch_get_global_queue(0,0)] chain:^ SPTask*(UIImage *image) {

The data has arrived. We’re on a global background queue, so we can do tons of expensive work here without affecting anyone. Once we’re done doing our work, chain it together with a new task that…

		return [_imageHostingService postImageAndReturnImageURL:image];
	} on:_imageHostingService.workQueue];

sends our funky image to an image hosting service, which we also have an agent service for. -[postImage…] returns an SPTask, which we will wait for. We can return this final task to the caller of ’funkifyImage…’, and it will represent the entire chain of actions. In addition, the task will yield the URL of the image when hosted at that service. Finally, we don’t have to handle any errors in this chain: the caller can add an errback to the last task in the chain, and it can thereby handle any error in any part of the chain.

}

Fin. I’ve packaged the two classes in a Github project called SPAsync. Feel free to fork, comment, or contact me personally!

Thanks to Dan and Mattias for the feedback while I was writing this article!

super mutroid

2013-01-20T23:18:26+01:00

mastervone:

During the Music Hack Day Stockholm 2013 hackathon, me and mandy forked Deathtroid into Super Mutroid (full source code), added EchoNest and Spotify support, and made a Metroid music game.

You can download it here (requires Mac OS 10.8): Download from cl.ly

From the Hack project page:

Music/rhythm platform game with a Super Metroid theme

Description

Plays a song through Libspotify and downloads song data from EchoNest. Generates obstacles based on the beats in the song.

How to play

W - Jump

S - Duck

When you start the game, enter a player name to the left and your Spotify login details to the right. You can also enter a Spotify track url in the text field under the Login button.

Then just press “Create Game” and wait for the song to load! (The character will automatically start running when the song has been loaded. If nothing happens after several seconds, the song you entered probably isn’t available on EchoNest.)

You die if the character runs into the spikes. If that happens, press any key to restart. If you want to enter another track url, you have to quit the game and restart it.

Known bugs

Sometimes crashes when you press Create Game

Flickering character

You can jump through the spikes that you are supposed to duck under

My Inner Hulk

2012-08-25T10:40:00+02:00

The idea of writing iOS apps using HTML makes me mad. It infuriates me. This is a strange thing, and generally a sign that I should cool down, breathe deeply, and just ignore the subject until it’s been simmering in my brain long enough for me to think clearly about it. But it’s been years, now! How much breathing can a man take?

It’s so slow! And ugly! And inelegant! I either need a few absolute-positioned elements, or a layout that I’ll need to write code for anyway. Why would I involve a super-complex layout engine for that? Why do I want a document-based model conceived in the nineties for my playback UI? Why do I want an engine where a single missing “return NO” will make my button completely wipe out all existing state in my app and effectively restart it? One where loading is so slow that it’s designed to always be progressive, flickering like an Atari while slowly putting UI controls on my screen?

Argument: HTML will be fast enough soon.
Counter-argument: And by then native will be even faster.
Inner, loud voice: Oh yeah? I bet this will be the year of Linux on the desktop too.
Digression: Whatever computer speed we reach, we will find ways to use that power to make better UIs. The idea that an inefficient platform can “catch up” because there is some kind of level where you don’t need more processing power to make a great UI is a fallacy. Remember when floating-point animations with multiple transparent layers was expensive? If you are using the above argument, you’re the guy who argued that they’re a waste of cycles and don’t make a UI better.

Argument: HTML will have all the features native apps have soon.
Counter-argument: And by then native will have more features, some of which will be untranslatable or very hard to translate to a web environment.
Inner, loud voice: Draaag and droooppppp arrrrgggghhh

Argument: The reason every native-app-with-web-UI sucks is because everyone else sucks. We can do it correctly.
Counter-argument: Really? Facebook just don’t have good web developers? I don’t buy that.
Inner, loud voice: No, YOU suck! Nngggghhhh

Argument: A-B testing, dude! Fast deployments!
Counter-argument: You’ve made a product change and agreed on all the design, figured out what to test and how to gather good data, implemented it, and got it through QA in less than a week? Maybe you need a web view. Actual, existing people: you can A-B test in any environment, whether a web browser is involved doesn’t matter, and you probably have time to wait a week.

Please flame me and prove me wrong. I’ve seen so many shit HTML apps, but maybe everybody really just is doing it wrong. And you’re right, I’m not a web developer, my javascript is shit, I haven’t even built a web page in a year, and I make a living writing ObjC. Of course I’m biased. Still, no ad-hominems please.

And you! You there staring at me angrily, just barely not shouting at me: yes of course some sort of insta-deployment web-ish platform is going to be amazing and take over the world, some time in the next decade. But it won’t be HTML5. Possibly it will be its grand-grand child platform, which will bear little resemblance to the original.

no title

2012-08-02T09:13:57+02:00

I had completely forgotten about nil targeted actions. BigZaphod reminds me of the canonical way of dismissing the keyboard:

[[UIApplication sharedApplication] sendAction:@selector(resignFirstResponder) to:nil from:nil forEvent:nil];

The responder chain is so under-used in iOS. I’ll definitely try to think of ways to solve problems using it in the future.

For those of you who haven’t coded for the Mac, nil-targeted actions are what makes menus (among many things) work. When you select “Copy” from the menu, this is sent to the first responder. If that happens to be a text field, that text field gets the chance to put things into the clipboard. If it had been a check box, the check box would have no idea how to copy. However, that check box might be in a window, which belongs to a NSDocumentController, and the document might have the concept of copying the document as a whole. The app would step through the responder chain for you, from the check box all the way to the document controller, and perform the copy. Magic!

Faking generics in ObjC

2012-05-07T01:51:00+02:00

If you have every touched C++, Java or C# and then moved to Objective-C, you have at some point written one of the following in a source file:

NSArray/*<MyThing>*/ *_queuedThings;
NSDictionary *_thingMap; // contains MyThing
-(MAFuture*)fetchThing; // wraps a MyThing

With TCTypeSafety, you can write pretend that you’re writing in a language with generics and write:

@interface MyThing : NSObject
...
@end
TCMakeTypeSafe(MyThing)

(later...)
NSArray<MyThing> _queuedThings;

Why?!

Assume that we have some kind of Future class. Assume also that we have a factory that returns Futures that wrap the asynchronous creation of a MyThing. We might want to define the interface for such a factory like this:

@interface MyThingFactory : NSObject
- (TCFuture<MyThing> *)fetchLatestThing;
@end

Later, when we use the factory:

MyThingFactory *fac = [MyThingFactory new];
NSString *thing = [fac fetchLatestThing].typedObject;

… actually generates a compiler warning, since typedObject returns MyThing, not NSString. (Note that we did not have to give TCFuture knowledge of the MyThing type to get this benefit, or modify it in any way except make it TCTypeSafety compatible).

This way, we can ensure that even though we have wrapped our MyThings in a TCFuture, we haven’t thrown away type safety, so that if we want to change the return type of fetchLatestThing, we can just do so in the header and then fix all the compiler warnings, rather than going through every single usage of fetchLatestThing and fix any now invalid assumptions on the return type.

This is also useful for collections such as arrays and dictionaries:

NSMutableArray<MyThing> *typedArray = (id)[NSMutableArray new];
[typedArray insertTypedObject:@"Not a MyThing" atIndex:0]; // compiler warning! NSString ≠ MyThing
NSNumber *last = typedArray.lastTypedObject; // compiler warning! NSNumber ≠ MyThing
NSLog(@"Last typed thing: %@", last);

What?!

The syntax for indicating protocol conformance of a variable is the same that you would use for template/generics specialization in other language. Also, the namespace for protocols is separate from the namespace for classes, so we can have a protocol with the same name as a class. So if we implement a protocol with getters and setters that take and return the type that we are interested in, we can get type safety. For example, we can create the protocol MyThing as such:

@protocol MyThing
- (MyThing*)typedObjectAtIndex:(NSUInteger)index;
- (void)addTypedObject:(MyThing*)thing;
@end

We then need to add support for these methods to NSArray and NSMutableArray. However, the type we are specializing on is only a compile time hint and does not affect the type of the instance, so in the implementation, we can just say that these return ‘id’.

@implementation NSArray (SPTypeSafety)
- (id)typedObjectAtIndex:(NSUInteger)index;
{
    return [self objectAtIndex:index];
}
@end

@implementation NSMutableArray (SPTypeSafety)
- (void)addTypedObject:(id)thing;
{
    [self addObject:thing];
}
@end

Tada! Write a macro that generates this protocol for you (like, say, TCMakeTypeSafe), and you have instant type safety.

There must be downsides.

Absolutely. You can only “specialize” on a single class: you can’t create some generic facility that would let you specialize both the key and the value of an NSDictionary. You have to use weird selectors such as -[NSArray typedObjectAtIndex:], since the protocol conformance sadly does not override the method signature for your array instance, and using -[NSArray objectAtIndex:] will still give you type-unsafe return values.

Worst of all, by applying the TCMakeTypeSafe macro on your class, it will suddenly look like it has the interface of both a to-one accessor, NSArray, NSDictionary, and whatever else you add support for in TCMakeTypeSafe. Thus, you wouldn’t get compile time warnings if you changed your NSArray into an NSDictionary, as you normally would. I think this trade-off is worth it, but I’m not sure.

Where can I get it?

At nevyn/TCTypeSafety at GitHub.

Update: turns out Jonathan Sterling had almost exactly the same idea only a few days ago.

Subtextual notation

2012-05-02T00:24:32+02:00

We’re still writing code as if on a teletype, and still feeding it to a black-box compiler, and getting magic out. There must be a more visual approach, that’s faster to code in than ascii, more succinct, giving you a better overview, an IDE that talks to you. I’ve been hunting for a visual programming language for a long time, as you probably know. Heck, I even wrote one (no, that’s not Quartz Composer).

So of course I had to back Light Table when I saw it. I can’t but feel that Chris Granger’s project is overambitious and too broad to build something general and practically useful, but it’ll be a very interesting journey.

While researching Light Table, I ran into Jonathan Edwards’ thoughts on it, “An IDE is not enough”. He’s been working on a visual programming language of his own, called Subtext. He’s chosen a very specific problem—conditionals—and extrapolated a language from that. I’m really not sold on his visual representation, nor the incredibly mouse and context menu-heavy interface, but I really like the idea and the thoughts behind it. While waiting for the revolution, give your brain something to chew on with the embedded video below the quote.

Much of the design of our programming languages is an artifact of the linear nature of text.

— Jonathan Edwards in his Subtext 2 presentation

hackbook hmd

2012-04-26T07:47:01+02:00

The hackbook project is alive! Or at least limping around. Finally got myself a cheap pair of Vuzix Wrap 920 head-mounted displays. Wearable computer + monitor, check! The stereo vision in them is horrible, but I only want to use one of the screens so that I can see my surroundings anyway, and on its own one of those screens is actually pretty decent. Haven’t dared to open them up further to see if one of the monitors can be detached yet, tough… Don’t have any input devices yet, either.

no title

2012-02-20T05:28:13+01:00

Fantastic and beautiful conclusion to Everything is a Remix, by Kirby Ferguson.

You can't discover anything if you can't see what you're doing.

2012-02-18T09:46:00+01:00

The above presentation by Bret Victor is amazing, and I couldn’t stop tweeting about it the other day. My mind was blown at:

4:20. cool! I mean, I’ve seen live editors before, but I never thought of actually using sliders on numbers. Clever! I remember now though, that this has been done by Codea (and probably others) before.

5:25. What. That changes the way I think about programming visual things. I keep thinking of all the times I’ve tweaked an animation or gradient, recompiled, redeployed to device, and get to experience my change maybe a full minute later. How many solutions have I missed, had I just been able to drag a slider to try variations?

I’ve tried to come up with solutions to this problem several times before. My first try was RemoteParameter. However, it is incredibly clumsy to integrate into the code being modified: modified variable must be KVO compliant, it only works for a single spot in the code (so it will fail if you’re e g modifying the background color for all cells in a list), and the editor UI is atrociously bad.

My second try was with NuRemoter. This tool I still actually use, and is somewhat useful in working with living code (sending calls in the middle of animations, debugging time sensitive operations, etc). However, it is not at all visual, and any code I improvise in the NuRemoter UI will be in Nu, which I can’t use as-is in my project without rewriting it into ObjC. I have a few thoughts here, though: first off, I should make it easier to hook Nu code into our code base, so that things that are naturally expressed in a script-y langage, can be. Secondly, the NuRemote protocol can be used as a payload delivery system for other tools. For example, if I ever write an animation construction kit, I could use NuRemoter to upload and inject animation descriptions into the app, and immediately try them out. (I’ve thought of integrating it into my Localizer localization app, too).

Wait, animation construction kit? Well, Core Animation is incredibly powerful and easy to use, but expressing animations in code is both unintuitive and slow (see: write/compile/deploy/test cycle), and maybe tobi is a better animator than me? I want something like the GLSL Shader editor: define input parameters (perhaps start and end locations, duration, intensity) and a sample image as a placeholder for the UIView being animated, and then define animations Keynote-style, possibly with values substituted for parameters. Output a json file, load it at runtime and use it instead of all the animation code. Shouldn’t be THAT hard to build?

6:10. My jaw drops just a tiny bit further, but enough to mark the time. Well, typing autocompletions into the autopreviewing document so that they run automatically is pretty obvious, but I love the idea of showing you what the thing does, rather than having you read documentation. Maybe the right sidebar in Xcode should have movies instead of help snippets?

7:43 and 8:12. How the hell did he do that‽

11:30. Again, how did he do that‽ He’s obviously not re-evaluating the whole file on each change. Maybe he’s been careful when writing the file so that it can be re-evaluated in the context of the currently “running” web page/js-vm? It looks like an incredibly nice way to code games, though. A little bit like Unity I guess; I remember having my mind blown the first time I saw that editor, too.

13:00 and 14:10. Now he’s just showing off. Surely this editor must be specifically written for this game engine he has constructed, and not something generic. Still want that code+editor, though!

Around 16:00 he re-iterates again how easy it is to be creative when you can visualize your results live, and how it doesn’t just apply to visuals or animations, but entire gameplay ideas. I’m so very sold on the idea.

Around 20:00, I really love the idea of supplying sample input data and see how that affects the code you just wrote.

Around 26:00, I should’ve realized that this is the same guy as the one who made That Math Video that blew my mind pretty thoroughly last year. I didn’t, until I checked his web site in preparation for this blog entry. He has plenty of new interesting entries there, if you haven’t checked them out lately.

However, out of all of these, the moment that perhaps isn’t the most interesting to me as a programmer, but never the less tipped me over from “yes, I am impressed” into a squealing, giggling pile of fanboyism, is 31:30. Probably the most amazing animation editor I’ve seen, and probably the most intuitive power user UI I’ve seen, and it’s just an experiment he made? MIND BLOWN.

I love how, instead of trying to solve the problem of tiny hit targets with giant thumbs, he has the user select the layer with her left hand, while manipulating it with her right. It’s a touch surface, and the user has two hands: why is nobody else using this fact‽ (my mind was similarly blown in ‘05 by the same multi-hand usage by TactaPad, which sadly never became an actual product).

Compositing all the different animations the user wants to get into the scene by just scrolling back time and immediately performing the next animation is equally genius (also seen, but not at all as well implemented, in Garageband.). Just look at the amazing speed at which he composes that scene!

However, out of all the amazing things Bret is showing us, none are as inspiring as his outro. Ever since I started programming, I’ve felt an idea or principle just at the edge of my consciousness. I know it’s related to creating a user interaction paradigm that is more natural, but I can’t describe it more clearly than that. I just know, for example, that multitouch is a step in the right direction. I haven’t thought about it too much in the past two years as I’ve been busy at Spotify, and Bret’s note at the end that doing only one thing will not give you insights really hit home.

Alright, enough gushing. I hope that after all that, you did actually watch the video, and that you found as much inspiration as I did. Right now, I just want to stop everything I’m doing and take a few months off life and make tools. I should probably finish a few projects first though…

Rapid network protocol prototyping with TCAsyncHashProtocol

2011-12-29T08:12:00+01:00

github:TCAsyncHashProtocol. I like constructing simple network protocols from plist/json-safe dicts, and transmit them over the wire as json. Easy to prototype with, easy to debug. Give TCAHP an AsyncSocket, and this is what it’ll do for you, plus support for request-response, and arbitrary NSData attachments.

It is an embarrassment and almost an insult that my example project is a massive 200 lines. I hope to be able to reduce the verbosity and boilerplate clutter of using TCAHP without making it heavy-weight. At the very least, I recommend that you use SPLowVerbosity.

An example of using TCAHP to send a request to update the server’s MOTD:

[_proto requestHash:$dict(
    @"command", @"setMessage", // the command is 'setMessage'
    @"contents", msg // Send 'msg' as the new message to set.
) response:^(NSDictionary *response) {
    // The server has replied.
    if([[response objectForKey:@"success"] boolValue])
        NSLog(@"Successfully updated message!");
    else
        NSLog(@"Couldn't set message, because %@", [response objectForKey:@"reason"]);
}];

And on the receiving side:

-(void)request:(TCAsyncHashProtocol*)proto setMessage:(NSDictionary*)hash responder:(TCAsyncHashProtocolResponseCallback)respond;
{
    NSString *newMessage = [hash objectForKey:@"contents"];
    if([newMessage rangeOfString:@"noob"].location != NSNotFound)
        respond($dict(
            @"success", (id)kCFBooleanFalse,
            @"reason", @"you should be kind!"
        ));
    else {
        _message = newMessage;
        respond($dict(
            @"success", (id)kCFBooleanTrue
        ));
    }
}

(Note the latest piece of magic that I added, where the selector of the delegate method is created based on the value of the key ‘command’ in the message. I quite like it.)

As you can see, the resulting protocol is very weakly typed. In theory, this means you will be making typos and not understanding why the hell your network seems broken; in reality, I’ve never had that problem.

If you are going to end up with a crappy to mediocre blender anyway, then why bother spending more or availing yourself of the advice and service of a specialty retailer? Reducing the overall quality of products thus destroys a key competitive advantage of Walmart’s smaller rivals.

2011-11-22T07:47:14+01:00

If you are going to end up with a crappy to mediocre blender anyway, then why bother spending more or availing yourself of the advice and service of a specialty retailer? Reducing the overall quality of products thus destroys a key competitive advantage of Walmart’s smaller rivals.

—Is your stuff falling apart? Thank Walmart (grist.org). yay for progress?

By categorizing our cognitive flaws, documenting not just our errors but also their embarrassing predictability, he has revealed the hollowness of a very ancient aspiration. Knowing thyself is not enough. Not even close.

2011-10-27T08:13:55+02:00

By categorizing our cognitive flaws, documenting not just our errors but also their embarrassing predictability, he has revealed the hollowness of a very ancient aspiration. Knowing thyself is not enough. Not even close.

—Is Self-Knowledge Overrated? at the new yorker. not very surprising, but sort of confirms that everyone’s an idiot, not just me :P

ive been trying to build a wearable computer

2011-10-20T08:34:00+02:00

I’ve been trying to build a wearable computer since forever, but I sort of got stuck because there aren’t (or I can’t find) any good HMDs (head-mounted displays) that don’t cover your entire field of vision (covering just one eye is fine, but being see-through would be the best, of course). I’ve had a Google Alert on the AirScouter for a year or so, and it seems they’re finally releasing them in some sort of product. I want one *so badly*, but they’re targeted at industrial application and priced thereafter, at $5200 :( I may be a huge frickin’ nerd, but I can’t really justify spending that kind of money on yet another hobby project…

no title

2011-10-07T05:23:40+02:00

Your brain begins to know that you are “enjoying” yourself, even if you hate this insipid thing. In spite of a love-shaped hole in the center of your spirit re: this electronic monster, you will not turn away. […] What gruesome psychomathematiconomist devised this heart-labyrinth?

2011-09-28T05:21:45+02:00

Your brain begins to know that you are “enjoying” yourself, even if you hate this insipid thing. In spite of a love-shaped hole in the center of your spirit re: this electronic monster, you will not turn away. […] What gruesome psychomathematiconomist devised this heart-labyrinth?

—insertcredit (4 chapters) reminds me why I hate “social games” more than TV. Memetic T-Viruses, turning human beings into zombies.

How To Fix Xcode 4

2011-09-04T05:59:00+02:00

People are sort of tired of me complaining; I’ve been saying I hate Xcode 4 since the first time I used it. “You’ll get used to it!”, “Learn Behaviors and everything will be well”, “Embrace the new UI model”, they said. I’ve been using it exclusively for several months now, trying to explore and use every feature of it; make sure to try to find a way in which I can confidently work in it. I failed. Launching Xcode 3 is a fresh breeze every time.

Just a note up front: I’m not saying Xcode 4 sucks. It is light-years ahead of Xcode 3 in many ways, particularly autocompletion and the IDEs idea of what the code contains (inline warnings and errors as you type is wonderful). This is just about the way it manages windows and tabs. And even then, maybe there is some mode or usage pattern that I don’t know about and would fit me better — if so, please shout in the comment or to my twitter!

Spatial Thinking

Xcode 4 works fantastically for a lot of people. How am I special? Why do I have to try to be so different all the time? Apart from just generally being an annoying sod, I imagine myself being a spatial thinker; I like to think in terms of spatially organizing whatever concepts I’m working with. I loved Classic Mac OS’ spatial Finder, where windows always appeared at the same location were it did last time, and there was a one-to-one mapping between folder and window.

The same goes for me and source code files. I used to work in Condensed Mode in XC 3; a single thin window with a project file listing, all source windows separate, and then dedicated slots for Build and Run windows on a separate screen (together with a terminal or two). I would work with a dozen source files at the same time, placing them around the screen. When I needed one I used recently, I would know where it would be spatially, and could just click a tiny corner or edge peeking out beneath whatever I was working on(1). This way I could also layer other applications in between windows, and have a rather deep pile of things I’m working on. It’s the classic desktop metaphor, and the main argument against Multiple Document Interfaces (MDIs) that we Mac nerds would ridicule Windows users for having to use every day(2).

You might be able to imagine why XC4 would then be a problem for me, with everything in a single window, everything appearing in the exact same location on screen as you instead switch between modes of operation in one screen area, rather than switching between locations and zones on the screen. It was — and is — a complete disaster for my productivity. I spend so much time switching between contexts nowadays, trying to reorient myself.

Staying In the Past?

Trying to work in an Xcode 3 manner in Xcode 4 is worse than just trying to adapt.

One of the best features of Xcode 3 is that it would remember all the open windows of a project when you closed it. In Xcode 4, closing a window is terminating it and its layout forever, and the last window you happen to close will become the main project window. Oh, you accidentally closed the window *you* consider the main window first, and then you had a reference header in a window configured for reading reference headers still open on another screen? Well, I guess that’s your main window now, and you’ll just need to reconfigure it as your main. (Update: There is in fact “Close project” in File which will remember all the windows. This doesn’t help in the situation where you close one window forgetting that you had two open though, which is quite common.)

Want a separate window for your build progress so you can keep track of what’s actually happening in your builds? That’s in a sidebar now, and if you actually want build details, you have to manually choose the latest build results in *another* sidebar, and then switch back to the first sidebar.

Want a separate window for your console output? Hey, there’s this hack where you can name a tab “console”, bring up the debug lower-pane, set that pane to console output, make the pane fill the window, turn off the left-and-right sidebars, drag the tab out to its on window. Remember to put it back in its tab before closing the window though, or it’ll become your project!

OK, this is not working.

Trying To Adapt

The way I work now is to have everything I used to have in separate windows, in separate tabs; and have Behaviors set to switch to them at appropriate times. I have one Build tab and one Debug tab, set up in a pretty nice way. I mean, this is okay, I can work this way. However, I do lose my focus a lot of the time, and I get lost trying to context switch between tabs. And I need to set this up for every project I start working on. And I can’t really use my secondary monitor for the things I like and used to do. And it’s just a pain.

Fixing Shit

Why alienate all spatial thinking developers from the Mac and iOS developer communies? I can absolutely imagine Condensed Mode working in Xcode 4. The concept of optional sidebars everywhere could still work. I’d just want to pull out the Project navigator sidebar into its own window which becomes the ‘project main’ (closing it closes all related windows); allow some of the more awkward sidebars like the Object Library to be a panel like in IB; have dedicated Build and Console windows; and have the IDE try to suggest the “one file per window” concept (but possibly allow browsing different files within one window is the user really wants to). I mocked up a horrible concept in Acorn, for your viewing pleasure:

This would make me very, very happy. Sure, it’d be half as “fast” as Xcode 3, it’d still forget how to autocomplete once a day, and crash pretty much every minute, but at least I could work with it.

Thanks to Brent Simmons for writing “The part of Xcode 4 that tires me out”, finally triggering me to write this post.

(1): This is why I hate Exposé in 10.6 and 10.7. 10.5 and earlier would lay out Exposé windows with the same relative position of windows as they were when non-exposéd. 10.6 started organizing windows in a frickin’ grid, destroying important information about where a window came from and what role it had. (rdar://7044208)

(2): It’s worth to note that the prevalence of MDI on Windows is a symptom of not having a real application metaphor, and thus having to group all windows in a meta-window in order to regain an actual application context. Mac OS never had this problem, as an application is the primary unit of operation and the main metaphor there, and not the window.

Software today is not engineering. Building the Empire State Building with three thousand people in a year is engineering. Programming today is more like the Egyptians piling blocks on each other and hoping it doesn’t fall over.

2011-08-08T00:55:00+02:00

Software today is not engineering. Building the Empire State Building with three thousand people in a year is engineering. Programming today is more like the Egyptians piling blocks on each other and hoping it doesn’t fall over.

—

Paraphrasing Dr Alan Kay in his talk “Programming and Scaling”. I got the same sense of depression over the state of our industry when I read about Doug Engelbart’s amazing NLS system from ‘68 and the Hypertext Editing System in '67. Yes, we have millions and millions times faster computers today, but what we’re doing today is not news. They realized already in '68 that you want direct manipulation and collaborative computing.

Every day, I spend so much time building almost trivial functionality in thousands of lines of code, with brittle APIs that hook into other people’s brittle APIs, because that’s the code base we have, and every other code base seems to be roughly looks like that, too. I spend my weekends learning about C and C-like systems because that’s what I know; I don’t go around learning about compiler-compilers, I’m stuck in what my brain already “knows” that programming is like. I didn’t know twenty minutes ago that you could write a complete compositing 2d graphics environment with 26 compositing method in under 400 lines of code.

My very good friend Martin once told me how different it is to even think in Japanese and Chinese, how those thoughts can’t even be translated into English. Kay’s realization that the same holds true for programming is profound in a way I didn’t realize before.

Back in uni I unwittingly participated in an experiment. One of the teachers arranged two lab sessions with the exact same content, and put Java programmers in one and C++ programmers in the other. We were given some UML and were asked to implement it. The real task had actually been to see how fast we could build it (but were of course not told in beforehand that we were being timed); and while I was fastest in my group and it felt like the C++ came out pretty naturally, the result showed that it took me twice as long to write the code than it took on average for the Java coders.

Ever since then, I’ve been worried that even though I feel like I’m really fast with my tools, those very tools are holding me back, and I’m *really* just a tenth as fast as I could have been with another set of tools. I love ObjC, but it’s still C, it still got non-object types, there’s still manual memory management, everything is viciously verbose, and meta programming is still more limited than in some non-C languages.

Bret Victor, beast of burden

2011-08-07T21:54:00+02:00

Bret Victor, beast of burden

Remember that amazing UI math video I posted a while back? He got a nice interview and article in nicecodesign.com. Apparently it was made by Bret Victor. I didn’t know who Bret Victor was until a few moments ago, but it seems he’s pretty much awesome. His web site is rather amazing, and his portfolio page about his work at Apple is very funny and very sad at the same time. He also worked at Push Pop Press; you know, that amazing publishing-revolutionizing company that got black-holed by Big Blue? No, not that Big Blue, the new Big Blue.

Design patterns in general are a recipe for failure, as they are indicators of flaws in your language. A design pattern inherently violates DRY as it means that many people have written something very similar, but it has not been abstracted out.

2011-07-31T08:38:00+02:00

Design patterns in general are a recipe for failure, as they are indicators of flaws in your language. A design pattern inherently violates DRY as it means that many people have written something very similar, but it has not been abstracted out.

—Matthew Maurer in a thread by Andy Matuschak. Whole comment thread is interesting.

Low Verbosity KVO

2011-07-11T03:50:00+02:00

DRY Cocoa: SPLowVerbosity

I love Objective-C. It’s a very explicit language: there is no magic in the language. If you want such magic as distributed objects, model classes generated at runtime, generic change notification, or heck, even referenced counted memory management, you can implement it yourself in a library. It’s also by convention a very verbose language. If the method name doesn’t say exactly what the method does, the author is doing it wrong.

However, there are some things we type over and over again every day, whose verbosity does not make the code more readable but only serves to pad the code file with useless characters. These are in particular array and dictionary literals, and formatted strings.

ObjC wizard Jens Alfke wrote MYUtilities quite a while ago, and in particular CollectionUtils. This header defines a few very handy macros such as $array(...), $dict(...) and $sprintf(...). $array is simply a shorthand for [NSArray arrayWithObjects:..., nil] (note the extra nil, freeing you from typing that yourself every time, and also avoiding a possible crash). $dict is NSDictionary’s constructor, with the arguments in the right order (key, value, key, value, …). $sprintf is [NSString stringWithFormat:]. It may seem trivial, but this simple header has saved me tons and tons of typing, and surely from some silly bugs as well.

For more C++ friendliness, and to not have to depend on the rest of MYUtilities, I wrote my own, called SPLowVerbosity, with mostly the same things. The details are not interesting, so I won’t list the code; click through if you are curious.

This is a hack, and while it is very convenient, it is not pretty. Objective-C needs in-language literals for arrays, sets, dictionaries and number objects.

I do believe that such literals are now inevitable, though. With ARC, what I wrote in the first paragraph is no longer entirely true. Dealloc now magically calls super. Memory management is implicit and part of the language, not explicit and manual. The sanctity of Objective-C’s simplicity has been violated, parts of Cocoa has been moved into the language. Moving more parts of Cocoa into the language (e g exposing APIs saying ‘this is the class that should be instantiated when I use a dictionary literal’) no longer has a high religious price, and I bet we’ll see it at next year’s WWDC.

Object-Oriented KVO: SPKVONotificationCenter

During the past few years, my nose has started to really pick up on a code smell I didn’t feel before: unencapsulated concepts. What I mean by that is an API concept or contract that is only visible in comments and documentation, thus only implicit by knowledge of that documentation when you read code using the API, instead of exposing the concept as a construct the language can help you manage.

Examples:

Mutex locking as two separate functions that must always be paired. This is an easy to make mistake, and can be very difficult to fix in complexly branching code. Static analyzation can find such errors, but is in my opinion the wrong approach.
UITableView’s beginUpdates/endUpdates must always be called in a pair, and all the updates you make in that pair must match the changes you are doing to the data source.
NSNotificationCenter requires you to register for a notification with a {sender, receiver, name} triplet, and reuse that triplet to destroy the subscription. In practice what you have here is an implicit object that you must manage using an awkward object triplet, rather than an actual object.
Key-Value Observing, with the same defect as with notifications, plus that callbacks are dispatched to the same instance method, forcing you to use the triplet plus a context pointer as the identifier again.

Instead of the above concepts being implicit and only visible in documentation, several of them can be represented as objects and closures, thus making it impossible to do wrong.

The realization is not new, of course. It’s quite common to use RAII patterns in C++ to encapsulate concepts in code, giving them an explicit start point and a managed (and deterministic) end point.

But this is Objective-C, not C++, so we don’t have RAII. We do have objects, however, and if we use them to actually represent our objects, we can clean up so much code.

SPKVOObservation is an object that represents a KVO subscription. When this object is created, you know you have your subscription. When this object disappears, you know the subscription is gone. By managing instances of this class like I would any other instance variable, I know I’m following KVO’s subscribe/unsubscribe contract. (With ARC, I don’t even have to manage the ivar).

SPKVONotificationCenter also has dispatch to a given selector instead of the catch-all -[NSObject observeValueForKeyPath:ofObject:change:context:].

(As for solutions for the rest of the examples: a closure can be used for the mutex case if in the current scope, otherwise you might want RAII (which is possible with GNU extensions even in C). For the table view, I’d prefer bindings, but doing to-many KVO and bindings can be really hard, so I doubt we’ll be seeing it on iOS in the near future.)

DRY KVO: SPDepends

I love KVO. Basically every library I’ve ever used has their own implementation of notifications on attribute changes. Such an implementation is of course not difficult, but because there is no generic system for it in other languages/platforms, you can’t build a framework for working with change notifications generically. Recognizing that this is a generic concept, and then as good as building it into the language is genius, and has given us wonders such as bindings.

Outside of their use in bindings where you have tool help, KVO’s API is pretty bad, and working with it is almost painfully verbose (made worse by the single callback point, spreading your code out all over the file). What I really wanted to do was to unify the two above sections for a very simple, non-verbose and object oriented approach to KVO. The result is SPDepends. Magic is taken to the next level; we are approaching dark arts. Whether what I’m about to present is actually a good idea or not, I leave as an exercise for the reader. First, the header:

tl;dr: SPDepends lets you give it a list of {object, key path(s)} pairs that one of your properties depend on. When the value of any of the given key paths changes, a given closure is called, letting you recalculate the dependent property (or whatever you want to do). It’s about as far as you can go with KVO without actually building bindings.

There is one additional piece of magic related to memory management (this was before ARC). By providing an owner and associationName, the dependency is assigned as an associatedObject, so that it will automatically be cleaned up when the owner object dies. Defining a dependency again with the same name will also throw away the old dependency. If this is not desired, you can just not provide the association name, and instead manage the returned SPKVOObservation object on your own.

Example:

Output:

Note how short the $depends macro makes all your KVO work. The macro also defines a block-safe self variable selff that won’t create a reference cycle.

The equivalent classical KVO code would be many lines longer. However, this macro takes several steps away from how Cocoa code is normally written. Is the syntax too obscure? Is the code still readable for normal human beings?

no title

2011-05-19T08:35:21+02:00

THIS. This is how to teach math. The contrast between the Wikipedia page and this application’s UI is striking.

File format plugin API for Spotify?

2011-05-15T20:20:00+02:00

At Spotify, we have one and a half day of ‘hackday’ ('code whatever you want’, the '20% time’ concept from Google) every sprint. Since the past few months have been a bit hectic finishing up the new 0.5.0 release, we haven’t really had time for that in a while, and thus compensated by having a whole week of crazy hacking this week. I managed to finish two features in that time; one in the iOS client (of which I will only say: Loren Brichter is my hero!), and one in the desktop client: file format plugins.

Last year, one of my hackday projects was integrating blargg’s Game Music Emu into Spotify, thus letting you play NES, GameBoy, SNES, Genesis, PC Engine and other console’s music files in Spotify. Just a few days of work, and suddenly I had the best console music player app in the world, with playqueue, playlists and whatnot. However, GME is LGPL and we statically link our dependencies, so there was no way I could release it :(

Thus, I aimed to hit two birds with one stone: by adding a file format plugin API to Spotify, I could a) enable anyone to add support for their favorite file format in Spotify (flac, mikmod, sid, …) b) let me release the GME support as an open source plugin!

However, I’ve never designed a plugin API in C before, and if we’re going to release it and support it for quite a while, it should be well designed, easy to use, and cover all the basic needs. It’s versioned, so it should be simple to add new things to the API, but changing the existing ones might be tricky. So, my question is: do you have any feedback for me on this api?

When you hand a recursive mutex down from one routine to another, the callee cannot know the state of predicates in the caller. It has to assume there are some, because it cannot verify there aren’t; and if the caller had known that there were no broken predicates, it should have allowed concurrency by unlocking.

2011-04-15T09:08:59+02:00

When you hand a recursive mutex down from one routine to another, the callee cannot know the state of predicates in the caller. It has to assume there are some, because it cannot verify there aren’t; and if the caller had known that there were no broken predicates, it should have allowed concurrency by unlocking.

—

So, late night hacking trying to fix a stupid bug in Spotify. Find out that all mutexes in the Spotify codebase are recursive. Googleathon about recursive locks. Find interesting stackoverflow answers and blog posts and stuff. Some say recursive locks are Evil, but their arguments aren’t super-solid. Find the guy who wrote recursive locks in pthreads. He has good arguments.

Basically: If you don’t know exactly the state of the stuff the lock is locking, how can you ever dare to call out to other code that would modify the stuff by taking the recursive lock? If you DO know exactly the state of the stuff the lock is locking, why are you holding the lock?! In other words, don’t use recursive locks.

On the plus side, it’s now easier to add a new contact, and I can decide whether to call somebody or start a chat by hovering over a contact. On the minus side, everything else.

2011-03-31T06:58:23+02:00

On the plus side, it’s now easier to add a new contact, and I can decide whether to call somebody or start a chat by hovering over a contact. On the minus side, everything else.

—ignorethecode on the atrocity that is Skype 5. It really is a bloated, ugly, misbehaving piece of crap software. It’s even worse than the original MSN Messenger for Mac OS, and that’s quite an achievement. (Bloated chat UIs are a pet peeve of mine; I had an argument with my friend Sterd about it back before I had successfully converted him to a Mac user (:P) using this picture comparing the space efficiency of an MSN for Windows chat window with that of Adium, and not even using one of the minimalistic Adium themes.)

iOS 4.3: imp_implementationWithBlock()

2011-03-29T19:32:36+02:00

iOS 4.3: imp_implementationWithBlock()

iOS 4.3 has a new objc api: adding method implementations using blocks. I tried to do the same once using libffi but never had the patience to finish it. This is a prettier solution anyway.

Eskil Steenberg (creator of Indie MMO “Love” - which is also a Voxel world engine of sorts) has told me that he doesn’t bother with small chunks – he just has a single Vertex Array that represents an entire quadrant of his spherical world, and to get around the massive waste of space he actually has to _defrag_ his graphics memory using his own memory management functions running on his GPU, effectively pushing all the active visible triangles together, and leaving a single large clear area of graphics memory for future triangles to be placed. This is the kind of batshit crazy engine programming I’ve come to expect from Eskil, and is not for the faint of heart.

2011-03-18T18:27:48+01:00

Eskil Steenberg (creator of Indie MMO “Love” - which is also a Voxel world engine of sorts) has told me that he doesn’t bother with small chunks – he just has a single Vertex Array that represents an entire quadrant of his spherical world, and to get around the massive waste of space he actually has to _defrag_ his graphics memory using his own memory management functions running on his GPU, effectively pushing all the active visible triangles together, and leaving a single large clear area of graphics memory for future triangles to be placed. This is the kind of batshit crazy engine programming I’ve come to expect from Eskil, and is not for the faint of heart.

—Defcon - Minecraft + Physics = Awesome (how can you not read an article with that title?)

UIKit: Hide the keyboard without a reference to the currently focused text field

2011-03-16T23:14:00+01:00

Googling for answers to UIKit or iOS/iPhone programming problems today resembles googling for answers to JavaScript problems. There is so much horribly, horribly broken code out there, being promoted as the way to do things.

Ranting aside, today’s problem is writing your own view controller container, and noticing that focused UI elements don’t dismiss their keyboard in response to viewWillDisappear: or similar. If this was MacOS, or AppStore approval didn’t exist, you’d just do [self.view.window.firstResponder resignFirstResponder]. You can’t do that though, firstResponder is private on window, don’t ask me why. cdyson37 on StackOverflow however, found the public API -[UIView(UITextField) endEditing:] hidden in a category in UITextField.h, that supposedly looks recursively through the receiver’s children for the first responder, and if found, resigns it. Perfect! A copy-pasteable code snippet for lazy googlers:

~~[self.view endEditing:YES]~~

UPDATE! Turns out I’m an idiot. While the above works and is correct, there is a better way. You don’t NEED to have access to the first responder, because you can use a nil targeted action instead, which will walk the responder chain, starting at the first responder. So a MUCH prettier way of hiding the keyboard is:

[[UIApplication sharedApplication] sendAction:@selector(resignFirstResponder) to:nil from:nil forEvent:nil];

Thanks to BigZaphod for that code snippet. I haven’t used sendAction: since I did Mac coding, before I suddenly became an almost-iOS-only coder in 2008. The responder chain is so handy, I must start using it more in my iOS coding…

no title

2011-02-11T04:08:10+01:00

Nerdery at its best. No better way to put your old computers to use than to make them sing! (via Keendra)

Rasmus Andersson: Why I wrote a programmer's text editor

2011-01-21T07:33:25+01:00

Rasmus Andersson: Why I wrote a programmer's text editor

rsms:

bla bla bla bla bla the less productive is the result. There’s an unfortunate common pattern when people open up a new application for the first time: They start by going into the “Preferences” UI and dig around like it was a game of Zelda. Instead Kod will have a very limited set of preferences which can be configured through a bla bla bla bla

YES! I need to do that! The preferences dialog for my next productivity app, there won’t be a standard Cocoa control in sight! It’ll be an RPG! And you have to explore the game world for *hours* to find the most obscure preferences! Want to change the default app to use for Frobnitzing? It’s right there, first room. Want to configure the font size of the auxiliary extension panel? You’re going to have AN ADVENTURE finding it.

Media keys hook in Mac OS X

2011-01-04T18:42:00+01:00

There is no nice (or is it even official?) way of detecting and handling the media keys on the user’s keyboard. One can intercept events with type NSSystemDefined and subtype 8 in -[NSApplication sendEvents:], but this has major problem: any other applications that listen to the media keys will receive these events too. This means for example that if only Spotify is running and you want to pause your music, iTunes will start when you press play/pause. If you have VLC running in the background, it will also start playing.

Apple has solved this problem internally by having their media key using applications cooperate and resign media key controls to the application that was in the foreground most recently. However, there is no way for third party applications to join this cooperation.

I have implemented a workaround that does this using a CGEventTap in the Cocoa class SPMediaKeyTapThe advantage of using an event tap instead of just intercepting the events in -[NSApplication sendEvent:] is that you have the power to throw the event away. This way, we can decide to “own” the media keys and be the only app that listens to them.

This class is smart enough to resign the media key event tap whenever another application that we know will want to use the media keys becomes active, and keeps track of which media key using app was recently started.

If everyone uses this class, and everyone add each other’s bundle ID to that list of whitelisted bundle ID’s, we’ll get nice behavior from all apps. An even better solution would be if Apple provided a way of acquiring the media keys.

no title

2010-12-12T08:08:53+01:00

thedevilswater:

maybe half of spotifys dev team is completely

2010-11-17T05:39:00+01:00

Maybe half of Spotify’s dev team is completely addicted to Minecraft. We spent maybe six hours last night making this on our own multiplayer server. It doesn’t come through very well in a still picture, but that thing there is *huge*. (For perspective, this is from during the construction process (or rather the first; we redid the whole thing after that due to mistakes))

List of capabilities web apps need but can't currently have

2010-11-08T17:20:00+01:00

I despise using web apps. The only ones I’ve found that are even at least useful are made by Google, and Google’s web apps are as aesthetically pleasing and user friendly as a Windows 98 shareware app. But even if they were made with the same care and attention to detail as Mac apps by Cultured Code or Omni Group, they’d still have a long way to go before being as useful and productive as a native desktop app, because they’d be missing some essential features the browser can’t give them. This is my list of these features, as I think of them.

Undo/redo for non-text things (that is, JS hooks for undo)
Pasteboard for anything but text. Important: application-specific objects like e g “calendar event” in an iCal like app, not just a generic group of common media (like pictures, audio, video, styled text, …), although that would be really nice as a stop-gap measure
Host application menu integration, with a standardized way to handle keyboard shortcuts
A windowing concept of “application” with several windows and OS hooks (i e dock icon or task bar group)
Context menus
Some document store model that is shareable between web apps. Example: if I have an image, I want to be able to open it in both a nice editor, and a nice viewer, which might be two completely separate apps by completely separate vendors.

There is one things a web app can’t *ever* have without doing tons and tons of work, and that is behaving like a native app. Google has fake context menus in their apps for example, but they don’t contain the options normally available when context-clicking text in Mac OS; for example, right clicking a word in Wave won’t let me look it up in the dictionary, speak it, nor do spelling corrections on it. Moving down a list using arrow keys is a very standard feature in list views in native apps; in Gmail this is an advanced feature you have to turn on, and you have to use letter keys to do the navigation (j, k for down, up).

I originally made this list in Wave over a year ago; moving it here since Wave is dying. The list is made a little bit antique by the introduction of the iPad; three of the items might now fall under the category of “things a native app might not need”.

The big wins you get with web apps are all in deployment. Deploy-once, instant upgrades, cross-platform. You can argue that sacrificing usability for easier deployment is worth it, but I’d rather do it the other way around.

no title

2010-08-22T01:53:33+02:00

Michael Casteel is my new hero! Got mom a 13" MBP a while ago to replace a Performa, but she missed Klondike and none of the other osx card games I had found were as good. Turns out Casteel ported his original Klondike to OS X! It’s originally a game for the Plus, I hadn’t even considered that he still worked on it.

Andrey Subbotin: iPhone 4 @2x assets made easy

2010-08-12T00:39:25+02:00

Andrey Subbotin: iPhone 4 @2x assets made easy

We were updating our app’s graphics for the gorgeous screen of iPhone 4 the other day and it was a pain to update all the 163 PNG files we had and not to miss a thing.

So, I’ve come up with a simple Ruby script that checks that for each @1x image you have a properly sized @2x image.

Man, such a life saver. sudo gem install ios-png-check is the path to bliss.

One-line closures in ObjC without blocks; or, NSInvocation fun

2010-08-07T05:53:00+02:00

Sorry for the crappy sound, have >100 safari tabs open and flash doesn’t like that… Why doesn’t Tone Matrix just support loading and dumping to/from some ascii format? (Dashboard readers: need to go to my blog to see this entry properly)

lucius cutest robots ever tweenbots are

2009-04-12T20:59:33+02:00

lucius:

Cutest robots ever.

Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.

Best comment from hackaday:

it just occurred to me - not only is it programming humans, it’s using an *exploit* to do it. people won’t just help any old object get to it’s destination, but a cute robot crying out for help? it’s a rootkit for people.
– peirun

no title

2009-04-11T19:42:55+02:00

Via @mikeash, the job you don’t want:

Cable loading on the “Durable”

wwwtopatococom sid05 moorewr tristanjay7

2009-04-11T18:34:51+02:00

www.topatoco.com < sid05 < moorewr < tristanjay7

Fantastic. I’ve always been worried that if I was transported back in time, I’d be too dependent on layers of layers of technology to have any useful knowledge whatsoever. This’ll save me, though!

no title

2009-04-11T02:17:55+02:00

Procrastination is BEING ME.

no title

2009-04-07T16:28:00+02:00

Voxar is “between jobs”. That’s an eupherism for “working all day on hobby projects”. Like Deathtroid networking. I added some sounds, too.

We seem to be running into some sort of pyglet bug though, where the timer makes us crash.


Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "src/main.py", line 295, in 
    pyglet.app.EventLoop().run()
  File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/pyglet/app/carbon.py", line 84, in run
    self._timer_proc(timer, None, False)
  File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/pyglet/app/carbon.py", line 133, in _timer_proc
    sleep_time = self.idle()
  File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/pyglet/app/__init__.py", line 187, in idle
    dt = clock.tick(True)
  File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/pyglet/clock.py", line 698, in tick
    return _default.tick(poll)
  File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/pyglet/clock.py", line 317, in tick
    item.next_ts = self._get_soft_next_ts(ts, item.interval)
  File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/pyglet/clock.py", line 585, in _get_soft_next_ts
    if not taken(next_ts, interval / 4):
  File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/pyglet/clock.py", line 563, in taken
    if abs(item.next_ts - ts) <= e:
TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for -: 'NoneType' and 'float'

I ugly-patched it like this:


--- clock.py	2009-04-06 22:20:44.000000000 +0200
+++ clock-uglypatched.py	2009-04-06 20:55:46.000000000 +0200
@@ -560,6 +560,8 @@
             scheduled nearby.
             '''
             for item in self._schedule_interval_items:
+                if item.next_ts == None:
+                  continue
                 if abs(item.next_ts - ts)  ts + e:

I’m guessing a schedule item shouldn’t be allowed to have a next_ts == None at this point.

Update: This bug is known under issue 407 on their bug tracker.

Review: PowerUp Forever (XBox Live Arcade)

2009-04-06T02:53:00+02:00

PowerUp Forever for the XB360 is very very similar to my all-time favorite shooter Battle-Girl by Ultra/United. If you’re, like me, a fan of the old classic, you know that there’s no MacOS X port. I’ve tried to reach Ultra/United many times without luck, and a few years ago their site died, seemingly from the domain expiring. I’d give a lot to be able to play that game again on a modern platform, even if neither graphics nor gameplay was upgraded.

Battle-Girl

PowerUp is, however, not Battle-Girl. It’s a top-down shooter with many similar characteristics. Free-roaming levels, lots of enemies, kill seemingly harmless enemies to lure out/foil the boss to finish the level.

The fluid simulation makes it look stunningly beautiful. It’s like you’re in some gigantic creature. After just playing a level or two, I felt that as all levels are open-ended and infinite in size, there’s no element of exploration; that was something I really liked from Battle-Girl. In BG, the first thing you’d do was to explore the level in its entirety to figure out where to hide when something big is incoming, or where Terminus (the end boss) would spawn.

PowerUp Forwever

However, getting into PowerUp, I realized that level design really is present, but in a very different way. It’s like Flow or Spore: you grow for each level, and suddenly those very dangerous enemies are so small and insignificant you just run through them, and the whole level takes on a new scale. There are structures in semi-random patterns, around where your Programmers from BG are; the spawns. Kill enough of them to finish the level. Sometimes the structures are really tight, and with hundreds of enemies all around, you almost panic. Luckilly, there’s the Smart Bomb. I found out the levels aren’t infinite, either; it seems a very fast and annoying enemy starts to spawn the longer from the real level you go, which means that if you wander too far, you will die.

I’ve only played the game for an hour or so, but so far, I thoroughly recommend it. It isn’t BattleGirl, but it’s just as good.

lucius snc add more cowbell to apple script

2009-04-04T06:36:41+02:00

lucius:

snc:

“Add more cowbell to” Apple Script command in Sound Studio’s library. What a great easter egg.

I love when people find my easter eggs.

Fellow developers,
You can stop adding easter eggs to your apps now. Lucius won.

voidstar game engine with the game voidbomb first

2009-04-01T07:52:00+02:00

VoidStar game engine with the game VoidBomb. First year project in Game Programming at BTH by me, voxar, sterd and mangeh. Conversation with Per brought it up, and I just had to make it compile again :)

The objective of the game is to drop bombs to blow up the ground (modifiable heightmap!) to find the flag.

Download for Mac, Source code repository

What’s interesting about this project is that it’s the origin for my favorite game engine design, and the same designed used in Deathtroid. There is only one Entity class, so instead of using inheritance to create different kinds of entities, one builds an Entity from Elements, one for each sub-engine. For example, to create the avatar in Deathtroid, we initialize an Entity with a ForceBasedPhysics element for the physics slot, an AvatarBehavior bound to the correct Player for the logics slot, and StateAnimatedSprite for the view slot.

Update: Forgot to bundle dependencies. Try it again if it failed for you before.

no title

2009-03-31T22:50:48+02:00

That was a good lunch break.

no title

2009-03-31T03:54:16+02:00

Fez. I have a soft spot for retro (as you know). Can’t wait to play it. (Confusing game? Try combining it with Braid!)

deathtroid r114

2009-03-30T08:31:52+02:00

Deathtroid, r114, after Per’s productive train ride home.

lan party turned into coding party were building

2009-03-29T15:13:00+02:00

LAN party turned into coding party. We’re building a multiplayer deathmatch Super Metroid Clone. It’s called… Deathtroid!

jxpx777 brettkelly luckyshirt and dont you

2009-03-26T07:07:55+01:00

jxpx777 < brettkelly < luckyshirt

And don’t you forget it. (Feels very relevant, re OnLive’s “impossible” new service)

DBGraffle4 : Automatically draw SQL schema in OmniGraffle

2009-03-26T01:38:00+01:00

Paul Davis wrote a script to extract the schema from a postgresql server and draw it in OmniGraffle. This is so handy you wouldn’t believe. Then his domain expired. It’s still available from The Wayback Machine however, but since that’s not indexed by google (as far as I know), I thought I’d replicate the relevant parts on my blog, to keep them alive. Mirrors of: the Python script and the AppleScript. You need both.

There’s also a version of DBGraffle that gets the schema from a MySQL database, by Thomas Pan.

Here’s a complete repost of his blog entry, with all links substituted with Wayback equivalents:

Visualdistortion:

General
This project is intended as a way to easily import an SQL schema into OmniGraffle. It was written for OmniGraffle 4. To the best of my knowledge it works on both OmniGraffle 4 and OmniGraffle 4 Professional. It will NOT work on any earlier version. The OmniGraffle team was nice enough to pressure me into updating a script I wrote last week to the new version so if you’re looking for something to use with OmniGraffle 3, check here for that. Its been very fluid with my web postings of this lately. If you can’t find something, hold on to your butt cause it’ll pop up somwhere eventually.

Me
Written by Paul Davis
Requirements

OS X

Omni Graffle 4

PostgreSQL

Python

AppScript

PyGreSQL

OS X
Errrm, you kinda need this to run OmniGraffle.
OmniGraffle 4
You need at least version 4.0 I tested this on the demo, and I think its working. I didn’t play around too much because I’ve been playing with the Professional version. It will NOT work on older versions, so if you were gonna ask that, you already know.

PostgreSQL
The basic principles of this should not be limited to Postgres. If you want to try extending support to other database backends, I’ll udate this so that everyone can share your wonderous accomplishment. Note: I have a very short temper for MySQL users.
Python
I used AppScript for this. AppleScript is not my friend. AppleScript is not your friend. The version that I assume came on this laptop is sufficient. I don’t know if it came on this laptop or it got installed as package. However, this version is good to go. I list versions a bit further on.

AppScript
AppScript is my friend. AppScript is your friend. Use AppScript and you will be smiled upon by whichever god scares you the most. That and you won’t go bald as fast as you would using AppleScript.
PyGreSQL
Mmmmm. My buddy Scott Lamb has got a project going to write some good Postgres drivers for Python. When he gets that into a working state I plan on migrating to use his drivers. Once you find the power of bind, its a bit hard to leave it.

My Versions

OS X 10.4.3

OmniGraffle Professional 4.1 Beta 1

PostgreSQL 8.0.2

Python 2.3.5

AppScript 1.0.0

PyGreSQL 1.33

Download

DBGraffle4.py

DBGraffle4.scpt

Installation

Download DBGraffle4.py and place it somewhere safe.

Download DBGraffle4.scpt and place it somewhere convenient

I reccommend using Script Editor to save the *.scpt as an *.app and placing it in the dock or on the desktop. After its there, you can double click it and follow the popups.

General Information
I used the red, blue, and green highlights just to show that you can alter the default properties of objects as they are created. If you open the python script and look at the first 20 lines or so, you’ll see where you can change the defaults to your liking. I couldn’t get the line jumps to take. It seems they got a whole lot more complicated than they were in OG 3.

Related Stuff

Graffle2SQL

DBGraffle - Similar thing for OmniGraffle 3

SQL Logger - The schema for the examples

Questions and Comments
Feel free to email me with questions and comments. I’m lonely.

Thanks

Jeff Melloy - I swapped him laptops cause I don’t have an Apple. And he’s good at SQL.

Joel Page - One of the Omni Graffle engineers. Gave me a hand with Omni Graffle 4

All the open source projects that I’ve used.

Money
I don’t want any. Send something to a charity. Preferably cancer research.

Use @rpath instead of @loader_path or @executable_path in .frameworks

2009-03-19T23:32:00+01:00

Update: mikeash has written an excellent post on install names, including @rpath. Just read his post.

I’ve written a great deal (1, 2) about how to make bundled .frameworks work. My “old” method has been to use @loader_path/../Frameworks/[frameworkName].framework/Versions/A/[frameworkName] in the .framework’s install name, and rewrite the .app’s load paths with install_name_tool if it’s wrong. However, I just found @rpath and it’s much more powerful and much easier to use. I’ll blog it more when I have time, but for now, read the documentation about RPATH and do use it instead of @executable_path or @loader_path, unless you have a good reason.

Using @rpath solves this problem:

Why? Because in the .app you can decide which RUtils.framework should be used by setting “Runpath Search Paths”.

Overly Judgemental IE6 Splash Pages

2009-03-19T21:01:00+01:00

jxpx777 < hugsformonsters:

While working on this site, I made jokes to Mike Yuan about having really confrontational splash pages for anybody that visited the site using IE6. I swear, I’m not this much of a dick to my users, but as a former PC user/Xbox owner, I have enough pent up MS-Hate to fill a fucking water tower. Just remember it’s completely a joke, I don’t care what browser you use as long as you don’t expect me to support it. Thanks for stopping by, hope you laughed.

Very tempted!

lifeofbk thank you thank you so much as i

2009-03-18T20:06:39+01:00

lifeofbk:

Thank you. Thank you so much. As I said a few months ago, the multi-ringing SMS alert was the worst new ‘feature’ ever added to the iPhone. I’m glad we’re finally getting the choice to fix it.

Whu..? I love that feature! I keep forgetting to check SMSes; with my old phone, that’d annoy people to no end. Nowadays I might actually reply!

Things move fast on the web, and so when a developer discontinues support for an antiquated browser I don’t think this person should be considered an asshole or an enemy of free information. Rather, more developers need to take such stands. We don’t have government agencies on the web telling us how to do things (for the most part, at least), and we’re better off for it. This means all we’ve got left to fall back on to make sure everything progresses smoothly is social convention.

2009-03-13T22:54:28+01:00

Things move fast on the web, and so when a developer discontinues support for an antiquated browser I don’t think this person should be considered an asshole or an enemy of free information. Rather, more developers need to take such stands. We don’t have government agencies on the web telling us how to do things (for the most part, at least), and we’re better off for it. This means all we’ve got left to fall back on to make sure everything progresses smoothly is social convention.

—Matt Langer on the responsibility of every web developer and hacker to further the web rather than to cater to technophobic backwards administrators and computer illiterates (in other words, dropping IE support).

The Dirty Secret Apple Doesn't Want You To Know

2009-03-12T20:38:00+01:00

You spend a shitload of money on iTunes.

Shoppy happy day of month
    Sunday: [========================                                 ] 36.9%
    Monday: [==                                                       ] 3.3%
   Tuesday: [=====                                                    ] 8.3%
 Wednesday: [====                                                     ] 6.6%
  Thursday: [===                                                      ] 5.0%
    Friday: [==========                                               ] 14.9%
  Saturday: [================                                         ] 24.9%

Shoppy happy month of year
   Januari: [==                                                       ] 2.5%
   Febuari: [==                                                       ] 3.7%
      Mars: [=                                                        ] 0.8%
     April: [                                                         ] 0.0%
       May: [                                                         ] 0.0%
      June: [                                                         ] 0.0%
      July: [================================                         ] 49.4%
    August: [=================                                        ] 25.7%
 September: [==                                                       ] 2.5%
   October: [==                                                       ] 3.3%
  November: [==                                                       ] 3.3%
  December: [======                                                   ] 8.7%

Number of obvious fart apps: 0

Apps statistics:
----------------
 Total applications: 149
    Total free apps: 106
 Total free updates: 74
    Total paid apps: 61
 Total paid updates: 0
Total spent on apps: 1465Kr [~$165]
 
Music statistics:
-----------------
         Total music: 163
    Total free music: 3
    Total paid music: 161
Total spent on music: 4547Kr [~$513]

Total spent in the iTunes Store: 6012Kr [~$678]

Find out how much YOU spend with Voxar’s script “itunes-store”. He’s working on a web service, but for now, you’ll have to run the script from your terminal.

Update: Voxar needs help with detecting tv shows in receipt emails (since they’re not available here in Sweden). If you feel like helping, feel free to comment or mail him at voxxar@gmail.com!

you thought the tweetie rejection was stupid pete

2009-03-11T19:27:00+01:00

You thought the Tweetie rejection was stupid? Pete Gallaway’s Diggle is a Digg.com client for iPhone. It was rejected (the offense) because that day, a Digg article with the title “FUCK” was popular.

Next: Apple removes Safari from iPhone for offensive language on my blog.

There's always time to launch your dream

2009-03-11T03:23:09+01:00

There's always time to launch your dream

jxpx777:

“I’d love to start a company / become a great programmer / write an awesome blog, but there’s just not enough time in the day!” Bullshit. There’s always enough time, you’re just not spending it…

I know, okay? x_x I’ve been fighting procrastination half my life. It’s one thing that this means I miss homework or even deadlines at work; it’s much more painful that I’m missing out on doing the things I really want to do, fulfilling my dreams. For example, I’ve been going on and on for about a month about how easy it’d be to add rudimentary networking to Overload, yet I haven’t written a single code on it during all that time. Not having time just can’t be true, even though I’ve been pretty busy. I’ve just… Not taken the time.

This doesn’t just apply to my dreams but to anything so it’s rather tangential to the OP, but still. It’s been the same pattern throughout my life: If something’s really important, either to myself or to someone else, I trawl my news reader or watch a tv series, feeling worse and worse and less capable of doing the thing the closer the deadline comes, until it’s too late, whereafter I’ve done neither the thing I needed to do nor things I wanted to do or would enjoy.

I’ve tried organizational software, schedules, rewarding myself for succeeding, punishing myself for failing, talking to a shrink, asked teachers for help, reading books, … It’s not a lack of time, that I know, but *what is it* that makes me make myself fail, over and over?

Py vs rb: Round 8451

2009-03-08T21:31:00+01:00

My brother sent me a vcard file and asked if I could extract its email adresses somehow (some 1500 of them). Started out with a regexp but it just made my head hurt, so I thought, “Hey, I could do this faster with a script” and googled for “python vcard”. Found vobject, spent half an hour trying to find samples and trying to make heads or tails of the documentation (don’t click if you don’t like migraine), but finally just gave up (I was in lazy-sunday mode and just skimmed the page and docus; imo, more shouldn’t be needed for such a simple task). Try two, googled “ruby vcard” and found vpim (note the ‘excessive’ amount of excellent samples). A “gem install vpim” and less than two minutes in TextMate gave me:


require 'rubygems'
require 'vpim/vcard'

cards = Vpim::Vcard.decode(open("/Users/nevyn/Desktop/vCard-kort.vcf"))

cards.each do |card|
    puts "#{card.email}"
end

I liked Python when I started learning it years ago, but I just can’t stand it anymore. I know it’s just a library, but I’ve had many such experiences with Python. And it doesn’t have proper blocks! Gah.

ds repair fail the replacement button was

2009-03-06T07:38:00+01:00

DS repair: FAIL :( The replacement button was upside-down…

nintendo ds motherboard pretty

2009-03-06T07:29:00+01:00

Nintendo DS motherboard. Pretty.

toradex robin module 16ghz atom 2g ssd

2009-02-28T21:51:57+01:00

Toradex Robin module. 1.6GHz Atom, 2G SSD on-board, 512M RAM, sATA, GEthernet, micro-sd, VGA… All on a credit card-sized board.

My next computer? ;)

marco macro shot of the kindles e ink screen

2009-02-28T17:11:37+01:00

marco:

Macro shot of the Kindle’s e-ink screen and text rendering.

It’s also clear that the globule flipping is approximate, at least in this early version of the screen technology. That’s why there are random black dots in the “white” areas (that’s not dust) and why some of the pure-black pixels have an occasional white dot hanging around (like the big one in the lower-left curve of the “e”).

I hope they don’t fix that. I haven’t seen a Kindle 2 IRL, but from the looks of that photo, the display looks delightfully organic and paper-like :)

adobegripes acrobat only the acrobat team

2009-02-28T01:54:00+01:00

adobegripes:

Acrobat: ONLY THE ACROBAT TEAM COULD MAKE AN OS FUCK UP THIS BADLY.

How is this even fucking possible?

Classic MacOS uses “:” as a path separator, while current MacOS and unix systems use “/”. If you use a “:” separator within a Unix context, it will look like a “/” in a classic Mac context (remember, Finder is a Carbon application), and vice versa. Most likely, the Adobe team used some old code from the Classic era that uses “:”, and changed it to use a new API (e g going from Toolbox code to CoreFoundation), but forgot to change the path separator convention in building the path.

Reproduce it on your own:

This is credited as being by Aphex Twin in the id3 tags. I have no idea if that’s true. Nevertheless, best Ghost in the Shell remix I’ve heard, and a really great piece of music.

2009-02-21T19:38:09+01:00

this is what a work place should look like

2009-02-21T07:14:12+01:00

THIS is what a work place should look like!

no title

2009-02-09T05:10:34+01:00

Sunday + at office + lots of macs + Airfoil + Vitalic’s V Live on Spotify = awesome.

no title

2009-02-08T04:49:00+01:00

Demo of the feature I described in my previous posts. Also of the new rendering engine in 0.3 (not out yet).

When you don’t drink, people always want to know why. They’re like, ‘You don’t drink? Why?’ It never happens with anything else. ‘You don’t use mayonnaise? Why? Are you addicted to mayonnaise? Is it OK if I use mayonnaise? I could go outside …’

2009-02-06T16:27:56+01:00

When you don’t drink, people always want to know why. They’re like, ‘You don’t drink? Why?’ It never happens with anything else. ‘You don’t use mayonnaise? Why? Are you addicted to mayonnaise? Is it OK if I use mayonnaise? I could go outside …’

—

Jim Gaffigan (via marco…chrispazen)

Ahah, fave quote. Never could remember who it was, though.

and he saw it and with his issues adressed he

2009-02-06T05:06:00+01:00

And he saw it! And with his issues adressed, he actually liked the game! You have no idea how good it felt to make just a single $2.99 customer happy! I’ll survive the week on this victory alone :)

so he didnt like me but i intended to change

2009-02-06T05:02:00+01:00

So, he didn’t like me, but I intended to change that. The second I got home from work I started researching exactly what was gathered, not just explicitly by me but also implicitly by Pinch Analytics. I added confirmation dialogs, made sure they were always in logical order, and with as short wording as possible. A few days after the horrible review, I pushed a new update. There is just no way to respond to reviews or bad reviews in iTunes; there was no way to tell the guy I had addressed his concerns in a way I hoped he found satisfactory, so I put his name in the update in the hopes that he’d see it.

my very first review of overload in the us store

2009-02-06T04:57:00+01:00

My very first review of Overload in the US store was a one star review :( This needed swift action.

NSFileHandle Considered Harmful [Updated]

2009-01-28T19:44:00+01:00

Update 20090627: This bug has been fixed in 10.6. I’d still only recommend using it for very simple cases, but at least it works now!

NSFileHandle has a bug where the calling thread will lock up indefinitely if a data of size >4096 is requested. Reduced case:


#import 

int main (int argc, const char * argv[]) {
    NSAutoreleasePool * pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];

    NSFileHandle *fh = [[NSFileHandle alloc] initWithFileDescriptor:fileno(fopen("/dev/random", "r"))];
    
    NSLog(@"Reading 4096 bytes... This will succeed.");
    [fh readDataOfLength:4096];
    NSLog(@"Reading 4097 bytes... This will lock for infinity");
    [fh readDataOfLength:4097];
    NSLog(@"This will never be printed.");
    
    [fh closeFile];
    [fh release];

    [pool drain];
    return 0;
}

(Warning: running this program might lock up your computer; killing the rogue process is difficult as NSFileHandle will read an infinite amount of data from /dev/random, swapping out your OS.)

This is extra dangerous if your read length is dynamic, such as in a protocol where the first incoming bytes defines how long the upcoming chunk to read is.

Solution: Use the C API for working with file descriptors instead, such as read() and write(). A file descriptor can be extracted with [NSFileHandle fileDescriptor] if you receive one from another API.

(This bug has been reported.)

via aco

2009-01-28T18:39:17+01:00

(via aco)

[Cocoa] Less code when working with delegates

2009-01-22T23:06:00+01:00

The usual pattern is to do this in your class that has a delegate:

-(void)frobnicate;
{
  ...
  BOOL extraJuicy = NO;
  if(delegate && [delegate respondsToSelector:@selector(frobnicatorShouldAddJuice:)])
    extraJuicy = [delegate frobnicatorShouldAddJuice:self];
  if(extraJuicy)
    ...
  ...
}

for every delegation method, which gets old, fast.

With DelegationHelper, you can do this:


// Setup
@interface FrobnicatorDelegationHelper : DelegationHelper  {} @end

@interface Frobnicator... { FrobnicatorDelegationHelper *delegate; ... } ...@end

@implementation
-(void)setDelegate:(id)delegate_
{
  delegate = [[DelegationHelper alloc] init];
  delegate.delegate = delegate_;
  
  [delegate setDefaultDelegationObject:BOOLobj(YES) forSelector:(frobnicatorShouldAddJuice:)];
}

// And then just...
-(void)frobnicate;
{
  ...
  if([delegate frobnicateShouldAddJuice:self])
    ...
  ...
}

Okay, the setup requires three extra lines and one line per selector (for defaults), but we’ve cut down the actual delegate calls from four lines to one! So if you have more than a single delegate method for your class, the DelegationHelper will help you.

For more samples, see main.m in my repository.

no title

2009-01-20T04:37:00+01:00

Hey, cool! I updated SoundApp Reborn this weekend with a tiny tiny 0.1.1 update, and already over one thousand people have downloaded it on macupdate and versiontracker! Pretty sweet for such a small app, and makes me feel even worse for not updating it in two years…

no title

2009-01-19T20:57:00+01:00

Woah, nice. Just noticed that even if an app has no windows open (in this case, Live Messenger), it still has an icon in the dock– err, taskbar. Application-centric FTW! (Usually the approach is to add a systray icon, which I always thought was a horrible hack)

heh that didnt last long

2009-01-19T06:44:00+01:00

Heh, that didn’t last long.

things mac os x 106 should steal from windows 7

2009-01-19T05:34:00+01:00

Things Mac OS X 10.6 should steal from Windows 7: Dock Thumbnails

Things 10.6 should steal from Win 7

2009-01-19T05:33:00+01:00

Like Jobs and Picasso before him said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal”. Microsoft seems to have realized that there really is something to the application centric model that Mac OS has been using all these years (as opposed to Windows’ long running window centric model, where each window is a separate process), and that the Dock might have some potential. Thus, they made their own version of the Dock in Win7, not the same, but similar. And I’m loving it. Apple really needs to take some UI hints from Microsoft here (!). Some observations follow…

When you right click on an app in the Mac Dock, you get an ordinary text menu with all the open windows in that app. In Windows 7, you get a graphical grid of thumbnails. This is so much better. Steal it!
When you hover over this thumbnail in Win7, that particular window is highlighted and all other windows are hidden. You can then scrub over all the thumbnails in that app without having to wait for the on-hover delay, to quickly look through the app and find the window you’re looking for. So useful, please steal this!

Now, I’m tempted to try to work in Windows, but I can’t make iPhone apps in Windows, and there are some things I know I just can’t stand. The most annoying thing is that the scroll wheel acts on the active control, not the control under the mouse (SO FRUSTRATING, especially when the active control is a popup menu). Doesn’t seem like they’re even viewing it as a fault. Also, I can’t stand Visual Studio, but I guess I could code in another IDE. Any suggestions? (I’m the kind that actually like XCode)

Accelerating Template-Based Matching on the GPU for AR Applications

2009-01-18T21:21:50+01:00

Accelerating Template-Based Matching on the GPU for AR Applications

Very cool, ARToolkit ported to GPGPU code. Doesn’t seem like they’ve released code nor binaries, though :( Which is weird, since ARToolkit is GPL.

Wikipedia: Lagom

2009-01-18T20:08:00+01:00

Wikipedia: Lagom

tristanjay7:

“Lagom is a Swedish word with no direct English equivalent, meaning “just the right amount”….In a single word, lagom is said to describe the basis of the Swedish national psyche, one of consensus and equality.”

Thanks to the Sweden episode of No Reservations.

Hah! Didn’t know it’d be so fun to watch a travel show about your own country. (Also, youtube ftw.)

no title

2009-01-18T05:14:58+01:00

“I’m convinced that most people only spend 1-2 hours a day actually working. Of that time spent, a lot of it is “meta work”, endless emails, scheduling, and such. When you go to work and sit in your cube you’re behaving pretty much like a CPU. Most of the time you’re at 99% idle, but you need to be there and “on” just in case someone needs some processing done.”

— Nathan Bowers < lindsaycampbell < marco


do {
  for(Distraction *d in [self distractions:kTwitterDistraction, kRSSDistraction, kIRCDistraction, nil])
    [self lazilyReadForAFewMinutes:d];

  for(Distraction *d in [self workDistractions:kEmailDistraction, kColleagueAskingQuestions, nil])
    if( ! [d canBeAvoided]) [self respond:d];

  BOOL wasInteresting;
  @try {
    do {
      wasInteresting = [self writeWorkRelatedCodeForSeconds:5*60];
    } while(wasInteresting);
  } @catch (ImmenselyBoringException *thisIsKillingMe) {
  }

} while ([NSDate timeIntervalSinceReferenceDate]

no title

2009-01-17T08:12:47+01:00

hrrrthrrr:

This is Where We Live by Apt Studio

Using more than 1000 books and three weeks of filming in stop-motion, the producers Apt Studio and working with Asylum Films made this beautiful film to commemorate the 25th anniversary of imprint 4th Estate. The film contains numerous in-jokes and references to the books it features, and everything, from the ships in port to the cinema in Soho to the man fishing in Central Park is made out of books, covers, pages and words. In the campaign’s website you can check photos of the making of.

no title

2009-01-16T11:22:10+01:00

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn’t seen it). Han. S. Solo.

my brother needed some math homework help figuring

2009-01-15T07:15:00+01:00

My brother needed some math homework help figuring out quadratic equations. I really want to teach him programming and I’ve shown him some very basic C before, so together we threw together a quick app solve quadratic formulas with the pq-formula :) [note: he chose project name :P]

(If you are a beta tester for any of my apps, you can even download and install the app and try it yourself!)

my current desktop picture i hope itll inspire

2009-01-12T08:35:52+01:00

My current desktop picture. I hope it’ll inspire me to finish my goddamn candidate thesis so I can get on with my life.

Last.fm

2009-01-11T22:58:00+01:00

tristanjay7:

kapi:

Please reblog with your usernames. Mine is kapi80

mahr

I’m nevyn. Tangentially, I noticed yesterday that last.fm has a nice iPhone version of their site, and I used it to settle an argument with my girlfriend whether I had listened to Jim Noir’s My patch one or five times that day, because she couldn’t get it out of her head. Turns out I had listened to it 3 times, not 1 :P Jim Noir rocks, especially My Patch.

Update: Cool:

Your musical compatibility with mahr is VERY HIGH

Bio-Bak

2009-01-10T22:26:08+01:00

Bio-Bak

Need to link this again. Most awesome portfolio site on the web.

The Dial Up Kid

2009-01-10T22:25:00+01:00

The Dial Up Kid

maniacalrage (via marco):

I still occasionally have nightmares that feature these sounds. The faces in this animation are dead on.

BioBak has a face animated to the modem sound in the lower left corner of his site (which is the most awesome portfolio site on the internets) which is much, much better. I wonder which was first…

pre spotlight

2009-01-10T18:56:00+01:00

It seems the Palm Pre has a system-wide search á la Spotlight. That is awesome — and only one of many awesome things about the Pre (I can’t quit obsessing about that awesome app switching UI (videos at the bottom)). For the first time we seem to have a truly worthy competitor to the iPhone.

no title

2009-01-04T22:09:17+01:00

It’s just like the vehicle in Tracktor Beam!

How to fix a syslogd that uses >100% CPU

2009-01-03T08:34:52+01:00

How to fix a syslogd that uses >100% CPU

Other symptoms: malloc errors in the syslog.

GetBundles

2009-01-03T01:11:00+01:00

GetBundles

Al3x:

GetBundles is totally sweet. It goes out and checks not just the official TextMate bundle repositories but GitHub as well. Once it’s got an authoritative list of all the bundles out there, it lets you install them with a click. You don’t even need to restart TextMate to make use of newly installed bundles. GetBundles is how you should get bundles.

It’s really weird that GetBundles is so unknown, given that it’s so great. Here’s how you install it the easiest way:

Open a new TextMate document

Paste this text in it:

mkdir -p ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles
svn co http://svn.textmate.org/trunk/Review/Bundles/GetBundles.tmbundle/

Select all and press ctrl-R
Wait until you get a lot of “A” lines in the document
Restart TextMate (or do Bundles > Bundle Editor > Reload Bundles) and you now have GetBundles! It’s under Bundles > GetBundles > GetBundles.

Here’s what it looks like:

Just double clicking a row installs the bundle.

no title

2009-01-02T20:26:00+01:00

My favorite Derren Brown trick: paying with blank paper instead of money.

National Consumer Agency of Denmark: iBook Lab Report

2009-01-02T06:42:00+01:00

National Consumer Agency of Denmark: iBook Lab Report

Okay, so back in 2006, the consumer agency of Denmark did some research on why the iBook G4’s logic board seems to break after 12-18 months. Turns out it’s almost always the same fault: a ISL 6225CA chip where the pins 1 and 28 are badly solded to the board, which makes the solder crack. This is why clamping or shimming the iBook makes it work, it rejoins the solder temporarily. Several users have tried to solder the break or shim the motherboard. Shimming only seems to work for a while, while soldering seems to work great.

It’s odd that I had such a hard time to find this report, given that it’s by far the most common reason why an iBook G4 breaks.

tristanjay7 livejamie reddit

2009-01-01T23:22:26+01:00

tristanjay7 > livejamie > reddit

tristanjay7 ericmortensen a book of musical

2009-01-01T23:14:00+01:00

tristanjay7 > ericmortensen:

A book of musical compositions where each note is transformed into colors. The artist Hoagy Houghton proposes a manner of playing piano original, which is based on the reading of the variations of colors. (via Aleatory Book Compositions - Fubiz)

Hey, that’s just Piano Wizard (warning: autoplaying video). Which @mandy incidentally gave me for christmas present! Its UI and gameplay is pretty horrible though, at least compared to guitar hero, and I’ll have to blog that extensively later…

The code that allegedly broke the Zune

2009-01-01T23:06:00+01:00

The code that allegedly broke the Zune

marco < jstn:

while (days > 365) {
    if (IsLeapYear(year)) {
        if (days > 366) {
            days -= 366;
            year += 1;
        } /* nevyn's note: this is where there should
             be an else { break; } */
    } else {
        days -= 365;
        year += 1;
    }
}

(Also, this is very ugly C style in many places. I expected better from Microsoft.)

The code from where this originated is available here. The funny thing is that the same code is copy-pasted in several places, with slight variations. Around line 259 is the offending code. Around line 554 is the same code, but done right (with a break after the second if).

Library code, people! Don’t reinvent the wheel! And if you do have to reinvent it, and you are *Microsoft* with all the money and resources that entails, get some real programmers to do the job, and spend time and money on very very thorough unit testing (e g, running every function through a table with every date from -100 to +100 years from now, or something smarter/simpler I haven’t thought of)

Update: More fun stuff. There’s a function that checks if a date is valid before setting it on the RTC (Real Time Clock), and it will return false for dates before 1980 and after 2080. Therefore, the Zune will stop working 2080. :P

Update: Yes, it was Freescale that wrote this code, should’ve seen that… I’m still of the opinion that Microsoft should’ve tested it thoroughly before using it, though, and I’m not alone in thinking so.

its about an hour til the next year comes round

2009-01-01T07:48:00+01:00

It’s about an hour til’ the next year comes round, so I put the project in a box to work on it later. BUT HEY, why not boot it while it’s in the box? OHYEAH.

okay still broken but at least free of its

2009-01-01T07:47:00+01:00

Okay, still broken, but at least FREE OF ITS PLASTIC PRISON!

im building a wearable computer starting with

2009-01-01T07:45:00+01:00

I’m building a wearable computer. Starting with getting this old iBook working. Ohyeah.

science from the top ten astronomy pictures of

2008-12-29T07:33:09+01:00

science:

From the Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2008 comes this spectacular picture (yes picture, not rendering) of spiral galaxy NGC7331, 50 million light years away. The detail in the photo is staggering and every little bit is beautiful. Here is the 3000 pixel wide ‘reduced’ version and for the insane, this page has uncompressed 4000 pixel wide images up to 67 meg in size.

The other top photos of the year are of course worth checking out as well.

(Nothing to add, it’s just plain beautiful.)

Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you’ll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision. So start small, and think about the details. Don’t think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn’t solve some fairly immediate need, it’s almost certainly over-designed. And don’t expect people to jump in and help you. That’s not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say “hey, that almost works for me”, and they’ll get involved in the project.”

2008-12-27T10:32:00+01:00

Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small trivial project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you’ll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision.

So start small, and think about the details. Don’t think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn’t solve some fairly immediate need, it’s almost certainly over-designed.

And don’t expect people to jump in and help you. That’s not how these things work. You need to get something half-way useful first, and then others will say “hey, that almost works for me”, and they’ll get involved in the project.”

—Linus Torvalds, via via via “A Double Handful of Programming Quotes”.

holy shit theyre actually pulling that ship

2008-12-26T10:10:46+01:00

Holy shit they’re actually PULLING THAT SHIP ASHORE. Some very crazy pictures of very poor people working as ship breakers in Bangladesh.

FROM HEAVEN IT DESCENDS; GOD DELIVERS ON YOUR DEEPEST DESIRES.

2008-12-25T07:13:00+01:00

FROM HEAVEN IT DESCENDS; GOD DELIVERS ON YOUR DEEPEST DESIRES.

I’ve been thinking about writing something like this for years and years, only I’d want it as a proxy between the browser and the server, with a two-pane interface for response/requests and headers and stuff.

Meanwhile, this will do very, very nicely.

my girlfriend made me a sackboy for christmas so

2008-12-25T06:24:00+01:00

My girlfriend made me a Sackboy for christmas! So awesome :)

tristanjay7kapi full house

2008-12-25T05:38:32+01:00

tristanjay7:kapi: Full House

no title

2008-12-24T06:53:05+01:00

tristanjay7:

hoarr:

tinycartridge:

Mega Man vs. Hard Hat, using every unique weapon and utility item from Mega Man 1-6, Mega Man I-V (Game Boy), Mega Man 7-8, Mega Man & Bass, Mega Man Powered Up, and Mega Man 9.

[Thanks, auntie!]

EPIC

WIN

GitHub Ribbons

2008-12-22T02:36:30+01:00

GitHub Ribbons

No better way to spend your Sunday evening than some serious forking.

awesome grafitti love it via via via

2008-12-20T07:35:27+01:00

Awesome grafitti, love it!

via via via

hard limits

2008-12-17T20:46:27+01:00

Hard Limits.

Pangea has been developing Mac games for over 20 years, but according to president & CEO Brian Greenstone, the company’s App Store sales since July alone have brought in more revenue than the company’s total retail sales over the last 20 years.

2008-12-17T06:33:36+01:00

Pangea has been developing Mac games for over 20 years, but according to president & CEO Brian Greenstone, the company’s App Store sales since July alone have brought in more revenue than the company’s total retail sales over the last 20 years.

—

Some iPhone devs raking in the cash from the App Store. (via marco)

Woah. I’ve been playing several Pangea games in my days (I’ve had a Mac for around 20 years now); just the thought that they could make more in just a year than they made in the previous twenty years kinda blows my mind. And as marco predicts, my own game hasn’t been quite as successful :P

I don’t see any value in forcing the single return. Actually I think it generally makes code much harder to read. It turns the execution path from a tree into an onion.

2008-12-17T06:10:00+01:00

I don’t see any value in forcing the single return. Actually I think it generally makes code much harder to read. It turns the execution path from a tree into an onion.

—

–dubwai on forums.sun.com

So it’s just not me! Gah, I thought I was going crazy. I can’t stand single-return code, yet all Apple sample and template code uses it! I just had to google it to see if there was some good reason for it, or if they were just being annoying pricks. Turns out they are just annoying pricks.

Compare!


- (id)initWithFrame:(CGRect)frame {
  if (self = [super initWithFrame:frame]) {
    do your stuff...
  }
  return self;
}

… to …


- (id)initWithFrame:(CGRect)frame {
  if ( ! [super initWithFrame:frame] ) return nil;
  do your stuff...

  return self;
}

Keep the common case left-most; indent the uncommon code and return early if the strange case makes the common case not make sense. So simple, so clean!

no title

2008-11-24T08:00:57+01:00

tristanjay7:

Castlevania Symphony of the Night: What is a man?

I still have this whole exchange memorized. I love Symphony of the Night.

Oh god, I love this passage. I have at least three friends with which I replay this dialog with regularly.

Sorry for spamming you, but just one more now. It’s actually called “one more”. Or at least it was once, he probably gave it a real name since.

2008-11-23T23:42:44+01:00

“Zenith”.

2008-11-23T23:41:54+01:00

This is his remix of The Flying Pickets’ Only You. I love it.

2008-11-23T23:38:47+01:00

Hey it’s my old best friend’s birthday today! I’d link him, but he took his site down. Instead, I’ll post my favorites of the songs he’s made. This one is “The Star Odyssey”.

2008-11-23T23:35:54+01:00

This song goes great with the comic below.

2008-11-23T23:04:13+01:00

how ironic that what i decide to do with it is to

2008-11-23T23:01:31+01:00

How ironic that what I decide to do with it is to blog it. That’s not breaking the mold, that’s what I do every day! Gah never mind, Sundays weren’t meant to be meaningful anyway.

no title

2008-11-23T22:31:34+01:00

Just wasted an hour on Youtube watching Louis CK. (7:00 and on is best)

no title

2008-11-23T08:51:21+01:00

This is absurd. I never realized there was this much air travel, every day!

If the magnitude doesn’t hit you with that video, go smaller; watch the one for just Europe. Remember, this is in a single day.

It’s amazing the Earth survives a *day* with all the pollution this must produce.

That’s why real programmers get confused by Halloween and X-Mas, cause OCT 31 = DEC 25

2008-11-18T04:48:08+01:00

That’s why real programmers get confused by Halloween and X-Mas, cause OCT 31 = DEC 25

—from a tdwtf comment

Ubuntu Oddities, pt. I

2008-11-16T09:19:52+01:00

Sharing fails
Context-clicked a folder and selected to share it. Said I needed to install a Windows networking service. I said yes, but I had synaptic open so it failed. Closed synaptic and tried again; but after clicking install service nothing happened, and then it said the session needed to be restarted. Doing so yielded nothing though, sharing still doesn’t work and trying to enable it yields the same result. Rebooting doesn’t help.

Can’t activate Nvidia drivers
Activating my wifi drivers worked fine, but when I click Activate on the nvidia drivers, 173 or 177, nothing happens. (A progress bar appears at 0%, spins indeterminately, and then disappears, with the state of the driver still as “unactivated”).

SOLVED: Trying to switch to fancy desktop effects bizarrely installs the driver without a hitch, and without showing that strange driver preference pane. It just installs almost silently.

Nerdtalk
Functionality needs to be installed through the Synaptics package manager. However, all packages have short, cryptic and abbreviated names that doesn’t say what the package does. That’s not very friendly…

Tiresome movie dialogs
Trying to play a mkv file yields a million dialog boxes with menacing icons that warn you about missing codecs, packs, and proprietarity. Clicking blindly on accept gets you through it, but it’s still pretty nasty.

Enjoy the silence
There’s no sound. Trying to change sound device yields the horrible assertion that “audiotestsrc wave=sine freq=512 ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink profile=music: Could not open audio device for playback”. What does that even mean?

SOLVED: The solution is of course to add an obscure line to an obscure file, as usual in Linux.

Wobbly priorities
Ubuntu has wobbly windows – but, unless it’s a configuration option somewhere, not live resize of windows. Priorities, anyone? Even Windows has had live resize for the longest time.

MacBook Pro Ubuntu triple-boot dancing

2008-11-16T09:13:44+01:00

I’ve had some serious problems installing Ubuntu on my MacBook Pro (revision D, the penryn edition, released start of 2008; the model before the unibody MBPs). I’ve tried twice now, once with 8.0 and then with 8.1.

After installing Ubuntu exactly according to the instructions at the Ubuntu wiki, the Windows installation would be broken. Directly after install, when trying to boot Windows, it would bluescreen for a fraction of a second and then immediately reboot. I’ve found through googling that the error message is “invalid boot volume” or something like that. Anyways, I googled some more and found out I had to resync the MBR and GPT partition tables, so I’d install refit and do that. After that, I’d just get “hal.dll missing or corrupt”! What the hell! Turns out the boot.ini needed tweaking to point to the right partition, but even after fixing that, I’d just get the bluescreen again. At some point I also just got a blinking cursor at boot.

Anyways, after hours troubleshooting I found this article on icrontic which describes a procedure that actually works. However, that’s not the one I followed; instead, I followed Craigular.B’s instructions, which you can find if you scroll down through the comments. I’ve replicated and annotated his comments below, with further elaboration for people who might not be as linux savvy as me or him.

Needless to say, make a complete backup of your machine before proceeding. I’m not even kidding. I don’t know how many times I avoided heeding that advice and just went through anyway, and I’ve regretted it several times. Just get an external disk and SuperDuper! your disk to it. It’s not very expensive.

Please read the notes at the end before proceeding.

Here we go:

Install 10.5. No need to partition yet, just install like you usually would. However, don’t run Boot Camp Utility! We’re going to use the diskutil command.
When the installation is complete and you’re ready, open up Terminal from the Utilities folder in your Applications folder.

You now need to figure out how big your partitions are going to be. If your disk is a 250gb disk, your disk will show up as 232gb if you get info on it. With such a disk, the following configuration would be a good one:

MacOS: 165gb
Ubuntu: 12gb
Windows: 55gb
165+12+55 = 232

Work out your numbers, and then type this command into the terminal:

sudo diskutil resizeVolume disk0s2 165G "Journaled HFS+" "Ubuntu" 12G "MS-DOS FAT32" "Windows XP" 55G

Replace those numbers “165G”, “12G” and “55G” with numbers appropriate for your harddrive, as calculated above.
Install Windows. Pop in your Windows CD, reboot holding c, install like usual. Make sure you install it on the fourth partition. In the above example, that would be the 55gb one. Having unique sizes for each partition is a good one to uniquely identify them throughout systems without ambiguity.
Install Ubuntu; download the regular i386 disk image from ubuntu.com, burn it with Disk Utility, pop it in, and reboot holding c. Follow the installation guide. When you’re at the partitioning stage (but before partitioning), press fn-ctrl-alt-F2 to get to a text console. Type: sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/tmp/sda.mbr bs=512 count=1

This will save your master boot record of your drive to a file in memory
Press ctrl-alt-fn-F7 to get back to the installer. Select manual partitioning. Select the /dev/sda3 entry (should be 12 gigabytes if you’re following the instructions exactly; if not, it should be the size you typed after “Ubuntu” in the resizeVolume command), press Edit partition, don’t change the size!, use as Ext2 file system, check “Format the partition”, type / as the mount point.
Confirm the partitioning, and ignore the warning about swap memory. You’ll be enabling that manually later. Continue with the installation until you are on step 7 of 7 of the installer.
It’s now time to restore the MBR. ctrl-alt-f2, type
sudo dd if=/tmp/sda.mbr of=/dev/sda
If you want to store the mbr for later use, e g if you are afraid you might mess it up later, you can do this:
a. Plug a usb stick into the computer
b. type sudo mkdir /mnt/foo
c. type sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/foo
d. If you get a warning about read-only, type sudo umount /mnt/foo, remove the stick, unlock it, and plug it in again, and continue from b
e. type sudo cp /tmp/sda.mbr /mnt/foo/
f. type sudo umount /mnt/foo and remove your stick
Press ctrl-alt-F7 to return to the installer. Click Advanced…. Change the “Device for boot loader installation” to /dev/sda3 so that the boot loader is only installed for the Linux partition instead of the entire disk. Press OK, and click Install
Reboot. Windows and Linux will be gone from your available boot options. Don’t fret. Boot into Macos. Install refit. Reboot. At the refit menu, selection the “Partition Tool”, and type “y” to accept its changing the MBR partition table.

Now you should be able to boot any of MacOS, Linux or Windows. If it freezes at the grayscale Windows flag or Penguin logo, just hard reset your computer and try again.

You now have a triple boot machine. However, you still need to finish setting up Ubuntu.
8.1 came with all the drivers (wifi, trackpad, graphics, keyboard fn-keys) you need for this rev D MBP (which 8.0 didn’t), so you’re done, yay! (although the wifi drivers have to be approved after the first boot due to being proprietary (as if that was some horrible thing))

Update: To get the sound working, you might need to follow the instructions at http://www.junauza.com/2008/05/ubuntuxubuntu-804-macbook-pro-sound-and.html (add “options snd_hda_intel model=mbp3” to the bottom of /etc/modprobe.d/options)

Update 2:
It is entirely possible that all the fiddling around with the MBR was completely unnecessary. This has taken my entire Saturday, and I don’t feel like experimenting with reinstalling it all once again. However, I think the two keys to success were:
1. Manually partitioning (which I found out after writing this guide you can easilly do graphically according to this guide: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=469999 )
2. Not installing the boot loader at /dev/sda but at /dev/sda3.

Just following these two points, and fixing the partition table with refit, should be all you need to get going. Please add a comment or mail me at joachimb@gmail.com for success or failure stories.

no title

2008-11-15T19:53:29+01:00

oblong industries, inc.

2008-11-15T19:52:40+01:00

oblong industries, inc.

If that was my office, I would live off saline solution and caffenie, I would never leave it. I would also have that music pumping throughout the room. Every second of my life from that moment forward would be a mini sci fi movie.

Ok, seriously though. It looks freakin’ badass, but I’d love to see some actual practical applications…

TouchFlo is like a very thin candy shell over the stinking pile of shit that is Windows mobile

2008-11-15T19:47:49+01:00

TouchFlo is like a very thin candy shell over the stinking pile of shit that is Windows mobile

— Gabe over at PA. Seems to apply equally well to all other recent Windows Mobile phones (Xperia, *especially* the original HTC Touch, etc…); I mean, how couldn’t it? A UI designed for keyboard and mouse, shoehorned into a handheld and retrofitted to work with a stylus by changing as little as possible to accommodate the change, and THEN taking that UI and retrofitting it for finger touch, again changing as little as possible, preferably not more than a new home screen? I mean, how could it NOT fail?

no title

2008-11-09T01:06:00+01:00

The Mac ZFS project is awesome and I can’t wait for the day when all my machines run ZFS, but that day doesn’t seem to be today. Bill Winnett on the zfs-discuss list:

Since posting this problem, I have also found other issues. Sometimes using finder to move larger files from a hfs+ filesystem to a zfs sub dir with umlaut O in the directory name, the file gets lost. The file does not seem to get posted in the directory listing after the copy completes. I have even found sub directories to completely disappear, even opening a terminal session and navigating to the work area and running find or ls, does not find the directory. Strange behavior to say the least.

I also find it funny that the mailing list software completely failed to handle ö in his mail, and he had to resend it replacing ö with “umlaut O”. You know what you call a programmer that’s not multilingual? … American.

no title

2008-11-06T08:18:00+01:00

Japan, in 1991 and 2008 respectively. Same train, same platform; very timeless. And VERY crammed!

no title

2008-10-23T05:17:43+02:00

John McCain: Negative Attack Ads Show You Have No Vision. I find this funny.

no title

2008-10-20T19:59:00+02:00

Updated my Mac Frameworks page with GLEW 1.5.0.

organized ignorance

2008-10-17T22:20:55+02:00

organized-ignorance

no title

2008-10-12T04:17:00+02:00

My Dock - “What Happens When I’m Stressed” Edition. I should prune that Safari to-read list…

Growl 1.1.4 with 0.1s transition animation

2008-10-07T05:18:00+02:00

Growl 1.1.4 with 0.1s transition animation

Just a little bit of sanity. It would drive me batshit crazy that the growls would animate in just so slowly, covering whatever you needed to interact with right now, and just when it starts to fade out you mouse-over it to click it to remove it, but it fades in on mouse-over! And then you click it, move your cursor away, and then have to sit through an additional 0.7s of fade out transition, and then you could interact with whatever it is you needed to interact with. Unless another growl decided to appear just then, and into the vacant spot. GRARGHHHH!

I never understood how LanOSD could die while Growl prospered; LanOSD was pure grace.

Funniest part of this hack: Just above the setTransitionDuration method, there’s a comment: “Maybe there should be a preference setting for this” (or something to that effect)

Erasable Shower Note Tablet

2008-10-03T07:21:00+02:00

Erasable Shower Note Tablet

And there we go. Out of stock, though… later: Okay, this then. Apparently me and shutupinternet aren’t the only ones with ideas in the shower :P

Shower Notepad

2008-10-03T07:20:52+02:00

shutupinternet:

I posted a little bit ago that I do all of my best thinking in the shower. Sometimes I either take too long of a shower or think of too many good things to remember so today (in the shower) I came up with this: Shower Notepad. (Pause for gasps). I’m sure there’s waterproof paper and waterproof pens so let’s make this happen so I won’t forget any of the prime things that come to me under my waterfall of joy.

I need this. All my best ideas come to me while I’m in the shower.

no title

2008-10-02T18:22:14+02:00

I have no idea what the hell they’re selling, but this is the most awesome ad I’ve ever seen.

Mobile-ITX

2008-09-29T05:02:01+02:00

Mobile-ITX

Hey, this is cool. Finally a motherboard standard at reasonable sizes ;)

no title

2008-09-29T04:57:02+02:00

Run Multiple Apps on Android. Suddenly I feel like switching platforms :P At least I really need to try this one out…

Yasushi Miura - Lotus I’ve had four of his songs in my library, recorded from soma.fm, for years, but never found more of his music. Today I found one of his albums on some russian site. This is so good I’m losing my mind. Update: Found some more of his music on the Internet Archive!

2008-09-28T04:58:00+02:00

check that search and replace bar bar not

2008-09-19T08:17:14+02:00

Check that search-and-replace bar. Bar, not window. Regexp. Syntax highlighted regexps. And the sidebar. And everything’s so clean. Jan, you’re the man. I’m crying here, it’s so beautiful.

boasas rocks

2008-09-17T19:34:47+02:00

BOASAS rocks.

no title

2008-09-11T08:46:13+02:00

When I read The Register on the recent Googasm over Chrome, and more specifically, Mike Arrington’s “Chrome will spawn millions of web devices that run Crome instead of Windows”, I immediately came to think of retort.nevyn.nu. (Use the linked video carefully as not to dilute the effect.)

via rocketjumper

2008-09-11T00:52:52+02:00

(via rocketjumper)

no title

2008-09-06T18:57:00+02:00

I made a demo video for Overload . It got onto one of the Swedish Mac news sites! :)

Overload on the App Store

2008-09-05T21:04:00+02:00

Overload on the App Store

My game is finally out on the App Store! :D Go buy it, now! ;)

Just some thoughts on the evolution of graphical interfaces

2008-09-05T07:10:00+02:00

I agree that the windows-and-menus GUI is getting a bit old, and I’ve been researching alternative UIs for a while and been keeping notes in my voodoopad. My Dream UI would be a Zoomable UI (cf Raskin, Seadragon), where objects are physical (BumpTop), the UI is deep (tracks user’s eyes to give the UI a perspective transform relative to the user, cf Johnny Chung Lee), and of course multitouch (cf Jeff Han). I call this a “Deep NUI”.

One guy actually nailed almost all of these in a concept, but his site seems to have died :( Anyone have a copy?

Update: Found one of the videos on Youtube. It goes by quickly, but check the screen while it’s visible:

Third Cog Software - Overload

2008-08-25T04:02:00+02:00

Third Cog Software - Overload

Overload has been submitted to the App Store! Now for the requisite week to be approved… Follow the link for some pictures.

this day turned out to be a walk down memory lane

2008-08-22T02:26:00+02:00

This day turned out to be a walk down memory lane. Somebody set up us the bomb!

clan g lan party in 2001 me and my buds back at

2008-08-22T02:20:26+02:00

Clan-G Lan party in 2001

Me and my buds back at a lan party in 2001. My brother is nearly inrecognizable from how he looks today; I, however, look pretty much the same.

no title

2008-08-18T14:34:00+02:00

Just committed the night’s work. This could be an awesome game. Overload: Coming to an iTunes App Store near you!

[During] any unexpected delay or shipment error […] the service provider gets to foot the bill to the tune of $5,000 per minute. […] What highly reliable application platform did the software developers choose? Microsoft Access.

2008-08-17T09:16:01+02:00

[During] any unexpected delay or shipment error […] the service provider gets to foot the bill to the tune of $5,000 per minute. […] What highly reliable application platform did the software developers choose? Microsoft Access.

—A Barely Accessible System - The Daily WTF

no title

2008-08-17T08:00:28+02:00

Death Star over San Francisco // Current
I don’t know who make these videos, but I love them. Fantastic atmosphere, and so surrealistic.

Nice design: David's Log

2008-08-16T12:14:53+02:00

Nice design: David's Log

It even sticks to the right. I love it. For some reason makes me very nostalgic, from when I played in TextEdit with text shadows and took blurry photos with an old Kensington 320x240 webcam.

no title

2008-08-16T02:17:02+02:00

Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene on Vimeo (via Vimeo). A must-watch. See also the project site for more. They might release souce this weekend.

no title

2008-08-08T22:38:25+02:00

Slow Motion Lightning (via Videofeber)

how to really use 4 gigs of ram via my flickr

2008-08-07T07:55:01+02:00

How to really use 4 gigs of ram (via my flickr)

Mutable Adventure, Pedro and Erlang Text Processing

2008-08-07T07:02:00+02:00

As some of you might know, I’m currently writing a game called Mutable Adventure, a 2D sidescrolling platformer MMOG with the editability of Second Life.

The thing about Mutable that interests me the most, however, is the networking. I’m using a library/protocol called Pedro, by Peter Robinson, which I found when Keith Clark presented it at work. Before I go on, I need to explain why this protocol is so goddamned cool.

Pedro and software agents

It’s based on Prolog, more specifically, his own implementation of QuProlog. It’s sort of a blackboard system, with a central messaging server that everyone connects to. It’s string-based, and what you send over the network are prolog fact-style messages, called a notification, for example:


  playerWasHit(152, 12388)

This is then broadcasted to everyone to subscribe to this message. A subscription might look like this:


  playerWasHit(PlayerID, ObjectID), PlayerID = 152

Notice that the expression contains Prolog variables, and a guard expression. This means that several clients may subscribe to the same notification, but with a guard expression that says they only want player info about their own player.

Each subscription is accompanied by a number, so that you on the client side can redirect the incoming notification to the right place. In Python I’ve implemented this so that individual objects may subscribe, and that individual objects may receive notifications. For example, say a ball is spawned in the game world. At the instance it’s instansiated, it may subscribe to information pertaining to this specific instance, by giving the subscription a guard expression with its own ID number. Boom, automatic network message propagation within your game client or server. As an example, in the client, the Tilemap class is appended with a category/mixin with the following code (notice the third argument, the guard):


  gClient.net.subscribe(self, "tilemap(TilemapName, NameOfTilesetTilemapUses, ScrollX, ScrollY, AutoScrollX, AutoScrollY)", 
                              "TilemapName = \"%s\""%self.name)
  gClient.net.subscribe(self, "tileInMap(TilemapName, TileX, TileY, TileIndexInRoomTileset)",
                              "TilemapName = \"%s\""%self.name)
  gClient.net.subscribe(self, "tilesInMap(TilemapName, FromIndex, ToIndex, TileIndexArray)",
                              "TilemapName = \"%s\""%self.name)

(Voxar has significantly improved the syntax in the Pedro python wrapper since then)

Suddenly, your objects aren’t mere objects; because they can communicate on their own with the outside world, and respond on their own, they’re now software agents. Also, because the messaging medium is now separate from the server instance, your game server may now be freely split as you see fit into several processes, both for load balancing and for division of labor into discrete entities, with higher cohesion and lower coupling.

The downside

Peter Robinson’s implementation of this concept isn’t perfect, however. First off, it’s written in plain c, and it depends on glib2. GObjects. I can’t stand GObjects. I can’t stand manual memory management. And it’s 5000 lines of code for a relatively simple concept.

Secondly, you just traded yourself simplicity for the price of a single bottleneck. A buggy, unstable, memory leaking single bottleneck with no means of load balancing or distribution. Written in C with a single maintainer, based on glib2 which is pretty hard to get running under Windows, if you would want to.

(I attended a 24 hour game development challenge a while back, where I wrote a networked 3D racer. Because I couldn’t get pedro running under Windows, I had to run it on my own server at home, while the judges tested the game from the other side of the country. >1sec lag and no lag compensation or similar whatsoever in the code = I certainly didn’t win that competition :( )

Erlang, The Savior

After reading Joe Armstrong’s book on Erlang, I was itching to write something. I tried writing a Twitter clone, thinking that Erlang’s highly distributed nature would come to great use there, but every line took a minute to write (because I’m so new to Erlang), and Twitter just felt too big and too difficult to write as a first project, so that got abandoned.

So, the next thing I’m trying is to write a Pedro clone in Erlang. It’s a good match, since the hardest part of of Pedro is the pattern matching, and Erlang got that as a part of being a functional programming language. I’ve set out to get it to work in 100 lines or less. So far I’m up to 60 lines, and I think I have a chance of making it.

In Erlang, processes are cheap and abundant. You spawn a lot of processes and then do all communication through erlang messaging. A common pattern is the middle man pattern. While cleaning the dishes I remembered this pattern, from its usage in an IRC client built in the book, and tried to apply it to Erdro (Erlang Pedro :P) conceptually in my head (Sorry, the following is a bit hazy as 1) I haven’t implemented it yet 2) it contains a lot of erlang terms). One problem with Erdro is that in its current implementation, even if you have a supervisor process watching the server and respawning if it does, restoring all the stack state, the process would be dead and the sockets meaningless, and all clients would have been lost and restring state would be pointless. However, if each client is abstracted away with a middle man process (meaning all socket communication goes to and from a separate process, and communication with the server is handled through erlang messages), you could store all the state including process pointers to these middle men in a mnesia database or similar, and if the server dies, respawn the server and its state and everything you’d have lost was a single message (the one that made the server crash); all socket connections would be alive and all clients just continue communicating.

Put the middle men on a cluster of machines away from the messaging server, each with its own IP and bandwidth, and you’ve distributed your network load. The machine containing the messaging server could self-immolate, still only a single message would be lost (given that there is another computer that could act as messaging server).

Process load balancing of the server, however, is left as an exercise for the reader.

The nitty gritty details of text processing in Erlang

There’s a slight mismatch between Erlang and Prolog, given that they’re completely different languages (one is functional, the other is logical). In the context of Pedro, however, I could only think of a single difference that mattered, and had to be changed.

In Prolog, the term “myFunctor(atom, anotherAtom)” defines a fact. In Erlang, it’s a function call. So, for this to work, I’d have to convert that term to something equivalent that could be used in Erlang pattern matching: a tuple, like so, “{myFunctor, atom, anotherAtom}”. Since Pedro doesn’t have tuples, the transformation is reversible and fully equivalent (I hope! It’s not like I’ve tested my code yet…). How would you do this? The first thing on my mind, being a ruby coder, was regular expressions. My first realization was the erlang’s regexp support is really, really, really horrible. Not only is it slow, its syntax support is so basic you might as well do without. My second realization was that regular expressions were a really bad match for the task at hand anyway. So my first real piece of Erlang code was a text search-and-replace implementation with pattern matching specific to my task:


functor_to_struct(PrologString) ->
  [First|Rest] = PrologString,
  fts("", [First], Rest, false, 0).

fts(BeforeFunctor, Functor, [], _, _) ->
    BeforeFunctor++Functor;
fts(BeforeFunctor, Functor, Rest, InStringEscapeMode, Prev) ->
  [Next|Rest2] = Rest,
  case Next of
    34 when (Prev == $\\) and InStringEscapeMode -> % \"
      fts(BeforeFunctor++[34], "", Rest2, true, Next);
    34 -> % "
        fts(BeforeFunctor++[34], "", Rest2, not InStringEscapeMode, Next);
    Char when InStringEscapeMode ->
      fts(BeforeFunctor++[Char], "", Rest2, true, Next);

    $( ->
      fts(BeforeFunctor++"{++Functor++", " , "", Rest2, false, Next);
    $) ->
      fts(BeforeFunctor++Functor++"}", "", Rest2, false, Next);
    Char when ((Char >= $a) and (Char == $A) and (Char == $0) and (Char =
      fts(BeforeFunctor, Functor++[Char], Rest2, false, Next);
    Char ->
      fts(BeforeFunctor++Functor++[Char], "", Rest2, false, Next)
  end.

Half-way through the code, it felt so horrible, I felt like I was writing the worst code in the universe. Now that it’s done, though, I find it pretty nice. It’s relatively short for what it accomplishes (replaces function calls with tuples, being careful not to interpret parens inside a quoted string) imo. However, after a good night’s sleep, I realized that this was a really stupid way of doing it. Why? Because Erlang has a code parser in its standard library.


  {ok, Scanned, _} = erl_scan:string("foo(bar)."),
  {ok, Parsed} = erl_parse:parse_exprs(Scanned)

yields [{call,1,{atom,1,foo},[{atom,1,bar}]}], a perfectly fine nested Erlang data structure that can be traversed and parsed. So that’s what I did!


  transform_calls_to_tuples(ParseTree) ->
    tctt(ParseTree, []).

  tctt([], Collected) ->
    lists:reverse(Collected);
  tctt([Token|Rest], Collected) when element(1, Token) == call ->
    {call, 1, FunctorNameAtom, ArgumentList} = Token,
    tctt(Rest, [{tuple, 1, [FunctorNameAtom | tctt(ArgumentList, [])]} | Collected]);
  tctt([Token|Rest], Collected) ->
    tctt(Rest, [Token|Collected]).

… which yields the same result, but in a parse tree (which you can turn into a string again with erl_pp, the pretty printer).

That’s it! I’ll get back to you when Erdro is done.

furbo.org · Beta testing on iPhone 2.0

2008-08-07T04:49:55+02:00

furbo.org · Beta testing on iPhone 2.0

Coding before design. Software tends to be much more usable if it is, at least roughly, designed before the code is written. The desired human interface for a program or feature may affect the data model, the choice of algorithms, the order in which operations are performed, the need for threading, the format for storing data on disk, and even the feature set of the program as a whole. But doing all that wireframing and prototyping seems boring, so a programmer often just starts coding — they’ll worry about the interface later.

2008-08-03T23:06:21+02:00

Coding before design. Software tends to be much more usable if it is, at least roughly, designed before the code is written. The desired human interface for a program or feature may affect the data model, the choice of algorithms, the order in which operations are performed, the need for threading, the format for storing data on disk, and even the feature set of the program as a whole. But doing all that wireframing and prototyping seems boring, so a programmer often just starts coding — they’ll worry about the interface later.

—Matthew Paul Thomas » Blog Archive » Why Free Software has poor usability, and how to improve it. Pen and paper, fellow coders. They are your friends. Also, this article is excellent, do read it.

Sid05 lifestream 0.1

2008-08-03T07:03:38+02:00

Sid05 lifestream 0.1

Very, very beautiful design! Best life-feed style layout I’ve seen. So clever, too! Just RSS importing and some CSS to get all that… Wow.

TUAW - Re-thinking the iPhone's home screen

2008-08-03T06:46:21+02:00

TUAW - Re-thinking the iPhone's home screen

christianbusch:

The iPhone ‘Desktop’ (Springboard) appears to be to small for the new amount of applications. Good point. I’ve got the same problem.

Apple do something! e.g. folders…

The article mentions Spotlight, and that’s actually what I had in mind. As you know, I have quite a few apps. Usually I navigate by icons, but that amount of apps just doesn’t fit on the small screen, so when I remember the name, a search field at the top would be great.

Nevyn's iPhone App Reviews

2008-08-03T04:26:56+02:00

Nevyn's iPhone App Reviews

I check out quite a few iPhone apps, so I’ve started reviewing them. Sure, you can do that at the app store, but I’d like to highlight the best and the worst.

no title

2008-08-03T02:04:00+02:00

While on the topic of the LHC. Via patrickcassels

large hadron collider nearly ready the big

2008-08-02T20:47:53+02:00

Large Hadron Collider nearly ready - The Big Picture - Boston.com. The LHC is as beautiful as it is creepy.

Is “Our Customers Are Stupid and Have No Idea What They Really Want” really Microsoft’s new mantra?

2008-07-30T22:44:00+02:00

Is “Our Customers Are Stupid and Have No Idea What They Really Want” really Microsoft’s new mantra?

—

“I’ve got to imagine that the Microsoft customers who took all the damn time to upgrade their machines to Vista, determined it was unworkable, and then had to take all the time to go BACK to XP, probably did so for a reason, possibly even a valid reason, and not because they had been swayed by bad word-of-mouth. I further imagine that these customers are completely livid at having Microsoft not say, “Oh, sorry, we’ll get right on those bugs,” but, instead, “You’re just stupidly following the crowd, and if you’d just free your mind up, you’ll discover you actually love Vista… hater.””

Call Me Fishmeal: “The Mojave Experiment:” Bad Science, Bad Marketing (The Mojave Experiment: Microsoft PR movie where they let XP users test Vista (with a Vista expert beside them) for ten minutes and record them saying that Vista doesn’t suck)

StupidFilter :: Main / About

2008-07-29T11:20:25+02:00

StupidFilter :: Main / About

I can write a StupidFilter in one line of code:

curl $1 | grep -iv "FIRST"

noigetit obama in berlin thousands and

2008-07-27T01:27:53+02:00

noigetit:

Obama in Berlin.

Thousands and thousands are out in Berlin waving American flags, shouting, cheering and clapping for an American presidential candidate. This is what it it looks like to be respected in the world again.

Exploring Unix Failures

2008-07-27T01:20:52+02:00

via threepanelsoulcom from the guys behind

2008-07-27T01:18:27+02:00

via threepanelsoul.com (from the guys behind MacHall (Ian McConville is my hero!))

no title

2008-07-26T09:19:00+02:00

Indecision - an interactive hyper-videoblog story (via borkware on twitter). Awesome idea, Make Your Own Adventure, with video and youtube annotations! Great idea, very much looking forward to what he or someone else might do with this idea :) (as this is just a concept) At the first choice, select “make videos” to hear his great idea elaborated a bit.

You must load the video on Youtube for it to work!

no title

2008-07-22T07:52:00+02:00

Borkware got me started on some really weird stuff, h a h a, but this guy wins!

Exploring Windows Failures

2008-07-20T07:29:00+02:00

So Voxar just described to me a scenario he just experienced in Windows. He ctrl-C’d folder A, pasted it into destination, and while Windows was thrashing on that operation, he ctrl-C’d folder B. By now, Windows was done thrashing and initiated the transfer proper, only, it’s now copying folder B, not A! We can from this infer that during a clipboard file transfer in Windows XP, the clipboard’s content is read *multiple times* during a single operation, during different stages of said operation, even though the stages may be very far apart in time.

This, my friends, is what we programmers refer to as “ugly, ugly hack” and not something you put into shipping code with any sense of pride, much less into an integral part of your operating system.

This event evokes the memory of when my brother accidentally moved his “666” folder (containing pretty much every semi-important file he has – personal documents, all his music, pictures, movies, you name it, in one very big soup of nested “New Folder (3)”’s) into an ajacent folder by dragging slightly during a double click. The move is instantaneous. After all, it’s just a single rewrite of the file table on the disk. He quickly realizes his mistake, goes into the ajacent folder, ctrl-X'es the mighty 666 folder, and ctrl-V’s it into the root of the disk where it belongs. Now, suddenly this isn’t an instantaneous transaction. Windows pops up its Moving Files dialog box, progress bar and all, and starts, very slowly, to move the files back, one by one. Half-way through, my brother hears the dreaded “BONGG” sound followed by an error dialog: “Could not move file: Permission denied” (or similar). His “seriously now.txt” (containing all passwords, phone numbers, and any information that could ever be of importance) and most of the mp3 collection have been moved. Everything else? Gone. It’s not in the root’s “666” folder, and the 666 folder is completely gone from the ajacent folder from the beginning of the story. All the rest of the files are completely gone, and confirmed so by a search.

Now this, my friends, is not what we call an “ugly hack”. This is what we call “a real fuck-up”.

Prince of Persia: Next Gen - E3 2008

2008-07-20T04:12:01+02:00

Prince of Persia: Next Gen - E3 2008

That music really didn’t go well with that trailer… Sounded/looked like some AMV off of youtube :P And it’s certainly visible where they got their inspiration… ICO anyone? (I’m usually a big fan of Sigur rós, btw)

Also, I dig the next-gen-ish cell shading-ish graphics.

via joar via twitter love the analog and physical

2008-07-17T03:39:00+02:00

via joar via twitter. Love the analog and physical widgets. “473” in the lower-left corner of the screen might be very /precise/, but preciseness is probably not needed in this case.

Properly bundling .frameworks in your application package

2008-07-15T06:54:00+02:00

Update: My blog post on @rpath supersedes/complements this post (it’s not finished yet, though).

I’m sure you’ve run into it. You build your app and it works fine, but when you distribute it, your users get:

Library not loaded: /Users/Richard/Library/Frameworks/libmng.framework/Versions/A/libmng
  Referenced from: /Users/nevyn/Downloads/Sphere-Mac RC3/SphereEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/SphereEngine
  Reason: image not found

One more time. This subject seems to pop up quite often, but I think I’ve finally gotten it nailed. Before I used to fetch the sources of all the libraries I was using, set up an .xcodeproj and set install_name to “@executable_path/../Frameworks/” (and that I did here). That’s not really necessary, and not possible for non-open source frameworks. So, no matter what framework or library you have, this is how you bundle it anyway, no matter what the install_name is.

Add an extra Copy Files target action in your XCode project (and rename it Copy Frameworks)
Get info on the new terget action, and set its destination to Frameworks.
Then, drag all custom frameworks to this target action, and they will be automatically bundled with the application when you build.
You will now need to gather some information. Run `otool -L on YourApp.app/Contents/MacOS/YourApp` and note its output for each of the lines corresponding to a framework you just bundled.
Next, add a Shell Script target action. This target action will call the install_name_tool to rewrite the linking information in the built binary to reference the bundled frameworks instead, even if the frameworks haven’t been built with an install_name of @executable_path/../Frameworks. Copy and modify as appropriate:

function relocateLibraryInCurrentApp() {
  install_name_tool -change $1$2 @executable_path/../Frameworks/$2 $CONFIGURATION_BUILD_DIR/$EXECUTABLE_PATH
}

relocateLibraryInCurrentApp /usr/local/lib/ libfmodex.dylib #note the space
relocateLibraryInCurrentApp /Library/Frameworks/ Foobar.framework/Versions/A/Foobar #note the space

Note the two different styles for a loose dylib and for a .framework. Just add one relocateLibraryInCurrentApp for each library or framework you’re bundling. Good luck!

Addendum: I realized that making a post that just describes how to do something, not why, is kind of lame.

In Mac OS, each binary contains a list of paths to binaries which it was linked to and which need to be loaded for all code to be available. When you launch an app, the runtime will thus load the app’s code, and for each library it needs to find will try to load it from the path set in the app’s binary. (For frameworks it’ll also look in /System/Library/Frameworks and /Library/Frameworks). What install_name_tool does is simply to rewrite that path inside the binary given as the fourth argument, searching exactly for the string argument #2, and change it to argument #3.

Additional resources:

This past November my wife and I had our first kid. She was on a special monitor because she had hypertension throughout the pregnancy. This monitor kept track of a number of vitals including some of the unborn baby’s as well. Sure enough it was Windows 2000 and sure enough mid-way through the delivery it crashed! The nurses had to frantically pull all the sensors off, hook up some secondary equipment, one that required a nurse to reach in to my wife to clip a sensor to my son’s head that required piercing his skin and hope for the best. Luckily, everything went fantastic and all was okay. Windows 2000 finished booting a few minutes after my son was born.

2008-07-09T23:57:14+02:00

This past November my wife and I had our first kid. She was on a special monitor because she had hypertension throughout the pregnancy. This monitor kept track of a number of vitals including some of the unborn baby’s as well. Sure enough it was Windows 2000 and sure enough mid-way through the delivery it crashed! The nurses had to frantically pull all the sensors off, hook up some secondary equipment, one that required a nurse to reach in to my wife to clip a sensor to my son’s head that required piercing his skin and hope for the best. Luckily, everything went fantastic and all was okay. Windows 2000 finished booting a few minutes after my son was born.

—Top Ten Worst Uses for Windows | NetworkWorld.com Community – I knew Windows ran in a lot of stupid places, but *medical equipment*? Holy mother of god, how stupid can you be?!

no title

2008-06-23T05:56:08+02:00

Real time tracking – this is absolutely fantastically great! No real-world markers or in-system knowledge about the surroundings beforehand, only extrapolating point-by-point the surroundings and using recent points as the basis for new points. I can’t wait to use this!

Man gets Windows Vista to work with printer

2008-06-20T20:29:35+02:00

Man gets Windows Vista to work with printer

Actual headline. Just can’t resist reblogging this; there’s just so much wrongness in it. One thing: apparently Vista *redirects* writes to a sensitive folder to *another location* on the system. This wouldn’t have *that* bad, if the alternate location wasn’t as sensitive as the first! I don’t have the details, but the article says the drivers were still active, which implies that wherever Vista redirected the files, they were still loaded at that location. Actually, it *had* been that bad: how does it make any sense at all to not just write-protect the folder instead? Oh, old installers would stop working then, you say? But apparently those that would’ve stopped working then are those that aren’t compatible with Vista anyway! Urrgh, I can’t stand it.

Stump The Experts 2008 (Audio only)

2008-06-14T07:45:00+02:00

Stump The Experts 2008 (Audio only)

I recorded the Stump The Experts session at WWDC 2008 with my MBP. I missed the first ten minutes or so, unfortunately.

Adding a player here as soon as I’ve uploaded the audio in mp3…

lol via boxbrown

2008-05-28T22:18:03+02:00

lol.

via boxbrown

no title

2008-05-23T23:21:33+02:00

“My God. Whoever created this has won the internet. Forever.” And I can’t but agree.

Weekend Hacking

2008-05-19T05:12:00+02:00

I had a lot to do this weekend and decided to do none of it, and instead ported sfxr to Cocoa, with a native UI and proper save/load :) My version’s called cfxr (as in “Cocoa sfxr”) and is available at http://thirdcog.eu/apps/cfxr . I’m not saying it’s better than sfxr, only different and more native. If you’ve got a 10.5 Mac, check it out and let me know what you think :) It’s basically just an experiment to learn Core Data and Bindings (Thanks, Scott!), and a reason to make save/load work better on the Mac.

The sfxr code (more specifically, the sdl port), when I first saw it, seemed like the worst mess I’ve ever seen. Sure, it’s a quick hack, but not even keeping state in a struct? OMG. But after working with this code for a weekend, it’s surprisingly good for what it is! “Porting” it to Cocoa was as easy as finding out which globals were properties of the sound (that is, attributes), and adding “sound.” before all accesses to those, and #defining objc syntax as C syntax for the four major playback methods. I guess I could’ve #defined the sound attribute accesses as well, making an upgrade as easy as a copy-paste, but I felt I had already done enough code generation for one day :P (Check out the legacyAccessors.m in the source to see what I mean :P Not very good looking code but it got the job done.)

It’s a rough 0.1 and might need some work. I was also thinking about making the playback part an AudioUnit or VST (just for fun) to make the playback more flexible. It works pretty nice as it is though, so do check it out :)

Lazy Man's Logging

2008-05-17T08:40:00+02:00

file_put_contents(…, FILE_APPEND) to log is a bad idea and you know it, but it’s sometimes good enough, or you just don’t get paid enough to make something serious. I just let you make it a tiny bit more serious, a whole lot more dependable, and still just change a single line of code.

  /// Creates a table called $table as (id, when, message) if none such exists, and inserts a row with $message in it.
  /// If no connection details are given, it uses the current database connection. Same goes for $database and $when.
  ///
  /// @returns TRUE on success or FALSE on failure.
  ///
  /// @example mysql_put_contents("orders", "I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER?", "mysite", NULL, "127.0.0.1:3306", "mysite_user", "secret") or die(mysql_error());
  /// @example mysql_put_contents("guestbook", "Longcat says: I'm loooooooooooong") or die("Errorz!");
  function mysql_put_contents($table, $message, $database = NULL, $when = NULL, $host = NULL, $user = NULL, $pass = NULL) {
    if($host)
	    mysql_connect($host, $user, $pass);
	  if($database)
	    mysql_select_db($database);
	
	  $qry = "CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `$table` (
             `id` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
             `when` TIMESTAMP DEFAULT NOW(),
             `message` TEXT NOT NULL
           );";
    $result = mysql_query($qry);
    if($result === FALSE)
      return FALSE;
      
    $qry = "INSERT INTO `$table` VALUES(NULL, ".($when ? $when : 'NULL').", '".mysql_real_escape_string($message)."');";

    $result = mysql_query($qry);
    if($result === FALSE)
      return FALSE;
      
    return TRUE;
  }

The simple fact that most or all of [Apple’s] competition haven’t really comprehended what Apple’s advantage is yet - it’s ascribed to design as in “pretty”, strong brand as in “luxury” and customer loyalty as in “Apple users are fools”. This cluelessness has given Apple a head start unlike a common technology arms race, and frankly there’s no sign that their competitors are about to “get it”.

2008-05-14T04:41:34+02:00

The simple fact that most or all of [Apple’s] competition haven’t really comprehended what Apple’s advantage is yet - it’s ascribed to design as in “pretty”, strong brand as in “luxury” and customer loyalty as in “Apple users are fools”. This cluelessness has given Apple a head start unlike a common technology arms race, and frankly there’s no sign that their competitors are about to “get it”.

—Arru in the comments to Moonwatcher’s Why Doesn’t Apple Face The Innovator’s Dilemma?

adium 125 when sending a file to a

2008-05-12T04:17:53+02:00

(Adium 1.2.5, when sending a file to a meta-contact (someone in my contact list who I have multiple accounts on))

Eh. Very nice, Adium. Classy. I like the unique identifiers. Thought Adium was above bad UIs :P

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

2008-04-29T01:27:00+02:00

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus

What I got out of this article is (and yes, I’m going to ruin the punch line now), if the US tv-watching population got up and wrote a few words on wikipedia every time ads came on, and wikipedia was started, completely from scratch, on Friday night, the entire history of wikipedia – every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in – would have been completed by Sunday night. One weekend. Just the time spent watching ads during one weekend. That completely boggles my mind.

(video version, via gruber)

The men who program in C are Real Men. The women who program in C are Real Men too. You can spot a C programmer from their testosterone fueled swagger, and the unbelievable amount of contempt they inject into the phrase Java “programmer”.

2008-04-28T19:54:00+02:00

The men who program in C are Real Men. The women who program in C are Real Men too. You can spot a C programmer from their testosterone fueled swagger, and the unbelievable amount of contempt they inject into the phrase Java “programmer”.

—Urban Dictionary: C++ via @violasong

PHP: Timeout on file_get_contents

2008-04-15T20:30:00+02:00

Since there doesn’t seem to be a single piece of documentation or example on the use of the context option for file_get_contents, and everyone’s actually setting the PHP app’s ini value for timeout (euugh) instead of doing it right, I thought I’d feed this to google:

$ctx = stream_context_create(array(

    ‘http’ => array(

        'timeout’ => 1

        )

    )

);
file_get_contents(“http://google.com/”, 0, $ctx);

The unit on the timeout argument is seconds as a float; that is, it is possible to use fractions (e g set timeout to 0.1).

my girlfriend will love this viajonic

2008-04-11T23:34:35+02:00

My girlfriend will love this. (Viajonic).

Dr. Albert Bartlett: Arithmetic, Population and Energy

2008-04-11T08:53:00+02:00

Dr. Albert Bartlett: Arithmetic, Population and Energy

These were not really things that I didn’t already know. Stated so boldly, however, the facts really shock me. I get the sudden urge to build a bunker powered by solar cells, and prepare for the inevitable war for our dwindling resources. (Video, audio, transcript)

“So no matter how you cut it, in your life expectancy, you are going to see the peak of world oil production.”

Trouble in Rails Land - order_id is null

2008-04-10T05:31:00+02:00

Trouble in Rails Land - order_id is null

Can someone please explain to me why this is fails? I’d be very, very grateful. I must be missing something very essential, and I thought I had begun to grok rails by now… It worked great for a while, and then suddenly stopped working.

no title

2008-04-06T21:35:33+02:00

Location bar autocomplete in Safari rocks.

Re: Firefox 3 vs. Safari 3

2008-04-06T20:32:00+02:00

I agree with everything that Gruber writes about in his latest article. A friend of mine went majorly goddamned-mac-zealot on me and his article (had to explain not once but *twice* that Gruber wasn’t saying “FF should be exactly as Safari” but “Safari beats the Mac port of FF on a number of points” :P) All is well and good though, as he found a fix for the most annoying UI element of FF3 for me: single-click-selects-entire-URL. I almost screamed from frustration from just trying to edit the URL a few days ago. Here’s how to fix it, though:

Go to about:config (type it in the location bar and type enter)
Filter on “clickSelects”
Double-click on the row that says “browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll” to set it to false.

Now when you single-click in a Firefox location bar, it’ll place the caret in it; double click will select word; and triple-click will select the whole line, just like in a Mac app.

Addendum: Okay, so Voxar tried to convince me that Safari’s location bar was idiotic and illogical (of course only from reading Gruber’s article and not trying it out, even though he has a Mac on his desk :P), and challenged me: if Safari always highlights the first autocomplete entry when you type an url, wouldn’t it be VERY cumbersome to enter e g “http://daringfireball.net/2008/” when the only URL in your history is “http://daringfireball.net/2008/04/firefox_3_safari_3”? The answer is of course, no :) In Safari, you type “da[right-arrow]2008[backspace][enter]” and you’re done with it. The same scenario in Firefox would require you to type the entire URL in by hand, since the autocomplete would be completely useless (even the AwesomeBar would be stumped!). Now I remember why I love Safari :) (Watch It In Full Motion.)

Micro-benchmarks are pretty irrelevant, and you would think Sun’s big honchos would know that. However, when you realize that J2EE is a huge pile of steaming manure weighing down the people unfortunate enough to be using it, I guess it makes sense to shout “but our arithmetic is really fast!”.

2008-04-04T03:27:13+02:00

Micro-benchmarks are pretty irrelevant, and you would think Sun’s big honchos would know that. However, when you realize that J2EE is a huge pile of steaming manure weighing down the people unfortunate enough to be using it, I guess it makes sense to shout “but our arithmetic is really fast!”.

—Earth to Sun

Human Computation

2008-03-31T05:36:00+02:00

Human Computation

This data set could be really, really, really useful.

build_hd_index is evil.

2008-03-29T19:26:54+01:00

build_hd_index is evil.

An old blog entry of mine about my arch-nemesis build_hd_index. I once disabled it by chmod 000'ing the file. I have now learned that this is a very bad idea. The 10.5.2 Server updater has a new version of this file. When Installer tries to install it, it fails. However, it does not rollback, which means that your system has just been screwed.

Target Disk Mode and Pacifist are my very best friends.

The truth, it hurts, it hurts! (Default parameters in Python seem to be evaluated once)

2008-03-24T06:39:00+01:00

class Bar(object):

  pass

class Foo(object):

  def __init__(self, a = Bar()):

    super(Foo, self).__init__()

    self.a = a

foo1 = Foo()

foo2 = Foo()

print repr(foo1) + repr(foo2)
print repr(foo1.a) + repr(foo2.a)
# foo1.a and foo2.a is the same instance

no title

2008-03-24T01:42:13+01:00

Lemonade trick (via engadget)

Ball Throwing Machine that a Dog can load - Hacked Gadgets

2008-03-23T07:52:25+01:00

Ball Throwing Machine that a Dog can load - Hacked Gadgets

via @voxar over IM. DIY FTW! :)

via arstechnicacom windows vista the modern

2008-03-23T01:33:00+01:00

via arstechnica.com. Windows Vista: The Modern Operating System!

Apple is legendary for being bad Windows citizens.

2008-03-21T19:40:15+01:00

Apple is legendary for being bad Windows citizens.

—waffle → Where By “Interesting”, I Mean “Annoying”. Indeed they are! Get your shit together, Apple. Don’t bundle QuickTime with iTunes. Don’t install a tray icon. Don’t be evil!

furbo.org · Brain surgeons

2008-03-18T05:28:19+01:00

furbo.org · Brain surgeons

So far best take I’ve read on why not allowing background processes on the iPhone is a good thing; backed by actual experience and everything. (He wrote a background processing app for a jailbroken iPhone and the battery died in hours). The idea that your app could register for getting launched and checking something in the background periodically when the phone happens to be online for some other reason is great, I hope Apple implements it.

Gruber mentions the AIM app demoed during the SDK event and how it would benefit from background processing. However, much of what you were looking to gain by running AIM in the background could be achieved by keeping the connection online on the server side instead, and pushing messages sent while AIM was off on the iPhone when it is started again (or when doing the kind of background processing mentioned on furby). (Update: that’s actually what they do)

no title

2008-03-07T20:03:48+01:00

no title

2008-03-07T06:46:03+01:00

Modular Snake Robots. Entirely awesome, although perhaps not as awesome s the iphone sdk ;)

iPhone SDK

2008-03-07T06:37:18+01:00

iPhone SDK

This is the first time that the gaming industry will be writing games purely in Cocoa and Objective-C. Given that a more-or-less fully functional 2D Spore was written in two weeks by EA, maybe this will be the eye opener for the big boy game devs out there that there are serious alternatives to C++ out there. And if the big studios start being sane, the rest of the industry will follow. Oh happy times! :)

broken ibook anyone know what this could be

2008-03-07T02:45:00+01:00

Broken iBook. Anyone know what this could be?

Update: I’m pretty sure it’s a broken graphics card. In the kernel panic crash report, the graphics driver is always in the call stack.

Update 2: Found and fixed the error; it’s a bad solder on the GPU’s voltage regulator.

That Cocoa training class was, as I’ve said before, one of the biggest eye-openers of my career. It was so damn easy to build beautiful, functional applications that I walked out feeling like I’d climbed into some giant mecha robot and could now lift huge girders with a wave of my pinky.

2008-03-05T04:42:00+01:00

That Cocoa training class was, as I’ve said before, one of the biggest eye-openers of my career. It was so damn easy to build beautiful, functional applications that I walked out feeling like I’d climbed into some giant mecha robot and could now lift huge girders with a wave of my pinky.

—In Which I Think About Java Again, But Only For A Moment — Thought Palace

Not that I think that there’s anyone who’s reading my blog and NOT convinced Cocoa is the best thing since sliced bread and that GUI Java is horrible-horrible-horrible, but still, a good read.

Noodlesoft writes about the history of the hideous thing we now know as Swing, and Swingdown on talblog follows up on the same subject. Sun really killed an AppKit-like Java toolkit just because it wasn’t built in-house? And when AWT was deemed too horrible and a new toolkit had to be built, they gave the job to the AWT guys? How could they not see the mistake in that? I guess that explains why Swing is so bad. (more: zefhemel)

no title

2008-03-05T02:15:00+01:00

Resizing a disk image in Disk Utility is not a pleasant experience. Updated: Fixed the audio. Click this link to get to a slightly better version.

Software Archaeology Find #4: The New Programming Paradigm Is Copy & Paste & Insanity

2008-03-04T23:39:00+01:00

    private boolean  loginOrganisation(String pUserName, String pPassword) {

        try {

            RemoteAddress[] status;

            if (Constants.DEBUG) {

                System.out.println(“[MotorolaEmulatorActivator.loginOrganisation] User ” +pUserName );

            }

            RemoteAddress[] domain = null;

            if (pUserName.equals(COUNTY_COUNCIL_USER)) {

                try {

                    domain = mHelp.lookup(COUNTY_COUNCIL_DOMAIN);

                    if (Constants.DEBUG) {

                       System.out.println(“[MotorolaEmulatorActivator.loginOrganisation] Number of correct domains found ” +domain.length);

                   }

                } catch (Exception e) {

                    if (Constants.DEBUG) {

                        System.out.println(“[MotorolaEmulatorActivator.loginOrganisation] Fel på Lookup”);

                    }

                    e.printStackTrace();  //To change body of catch statement use Options | File Templates.
                }

                RemoteAddress[] childs = mHelp.getChilds(domain[0]);

                if (COUNTY_COUNCIL_CONCEPT.equals(mHelp.getProperty(childs[0]))) {

                    mOrganizationDomain = domain[0];

                    mOrganisationConcept = childs[0];

                    mLoggedinOrganisationDomain = COUNTY_COUNCIL_DOMAIN;

                    //status = mHelp.getChilds(childs[0]);
                    //mHelp.setProperty(status[0], “online”);

                 return true;

                }

            }

            if (pUserName.equals(MUNICIPAL_USER)) {

                domain = mHelp.lookup(MUNICIPAL_DOMAIN);

                  if (Constants.DEBUG) {

                    System.out.println(“[MotorolaEmulatorActivator.loginOrganisation] Number of correct domains found ” +domain.length);

                }

                RemoteAddress[] childs = mHelp.getChilds(domain[0]);

                if (MUNICIPAL_CONCEPT.equals(mHelp.getProperty(childs[0]))) {

                    mOrganizationDomain = domain[0];

                    mOrganisationConcept = childs[0];

                    mLoggedinOrganisationDomain = MUNICIPAL_DOMAIN;

                    //status = mHelp.getChilds(childs[0]);
                    //mHelp.setProperty(status[0], “online”);

                 return true;

                }

            }

            if (pUserName.equals(PRIVATE_USER)) {

                domain = mHelp.lookup(PRIVATE_DOMAIN);

                  if (Constants.DEBUG) {

                    System.out.println(“[MotorolaEmulatorActivator.loginOrganisation] Number of correct domains found ” +domain.length);

                }

                RemoteAddress[] childs = mHelp.getChilds(domain[0]);

                if (PRIVATE_CONCEPT.equals(mHelp.getProperty(childs[0]))) {

                    mOrganizationDomain = domain[0];

                    mOrganisationConcept = childs[0];

                    mLoggedinOrganisationDomain = PRIVATE_DOMAIN;

                    //status = mHelp.getChilds(childs[0]);
                    //mHelp.setProperty(status[0], “online”);

                 return true;

                }

            }

        } catch (Exception e) {

            e.printStackTrace();  //To change body of catch statement use Options | File Templates.
        }

        return false;

    }

< Previous archaeology find

no title

2008-03-03T06:37:46+01:00

21:36:08 argon:/beta/www/trac nevyn$ for i in $( find . -depth 1 -type d ); do sqlite2to3 $i/db/trac.db; trac-admin $i upgrade; trac-admin $i wiki upgrade; done

Nice. I could learn to like bash scripting, after all.

Time Machine does not work over the Internet

2008-03-03T03:20:28+01:00

This might not come as a surprise to you, but I’ve been experimenting just to see if Time Machine might be able to backup my dad’s (Gunnar’s) MacBook and my girlfriend’s mom’s (Mia’s) MacBook over the Internet to my 10.5 Server. It isn’t.

I started the experiment in December. Mia’s backup had succeeded three times, all on December 17, for a total of 17GB. After that, Time Machine had shown progress bars and everything, but only completed four partial backups for a total of 40MB. Fourty megabytes in two months, all of it trying to backup /Applications.

Gunnar’s backup never completed even once in the same period. The .sparseimage was four megabytes, and the only transferred file seemed to be the alias for “User guides and documentation” that appears in the volume root of some installations. He had also reported that Time Machine frequently showed progress bars.

I really expected it to work, since, you know, it’s just a TCP link and the underlying network shouldn’t matter. The server is reliable and very rarely offline, and the MacBooks relatively often awake and online. Unfortunately, it seems Time Machine’s error handling is severely lacking. I suppose the only recommendation I can make is for them to get a Time Capsule each, if they want to continue using Time Machine; otherwise I might be able to use incremental Super Duper over the ‘net.

Me and my girlfriend have tried a whole host of backup apps by now. Homebrewn cron-driven rsync scripts (works great for mysql/svn backup but not large data quantities on mobile clients), Déjà vu (psync, ueherrghghhh!), Synk (just plain bad, all versions), CrashPlan (written in Java, ugh, sooo slow!), Carbon Copy Cloner (old and not incremental) have been tested but they all failed spectacularly one way or another. We’ve considered several more (PsyncX, ChronoSync, iBackup, SuperDuper!, …) but discarded them after reading the specs and a few reviews. Time Machine is buggy and slow, but so far the only backup solution for the Mac that we’ve found that works.

Time Machine is Confused

2008-03-03T02:14:23+01:00

Also, I have 21.44 GB free on that volume. Also, Time Machine is built specifically to handle the case of the disk being full by removing old backups.

TagBot - Spotlight File Tagging For Mac OS X Tiger

2008-02-29T08:31:11+01:00

TagBot - Spotlight File Tagging For Mac OS X Tiger

So annoying. I build basically exactly this utility, including the HUD UI. Then I never figured out how to make Spotlight index my tags :(

Oh. He cheats by using Spotlight comments, just like everyone else. Ugh.

The World's Ugliest Core Animation Demo App

2008-02-28T07:02:00+01:00

The World's Ugliest Core Animation Demo App

Written in ten minutes to show my girlfriend how Objective-C and CoreAnimation works.

EU Invests $22 Million in Next-Generation BitTorrent Client

2008-02-27T07:12:33+01:00

EU Invests $22 Million in Next-Generation BitTorrent Client

Crazy and wonderful!

Mac OS X 10.5 Server Admin is pretty neat.

2008-02-26T08:33:00+01:00

I know a lot of people complain about OS X being a bad server os. They might be right. However, so far, it’s been a smooth sailing for me. Sure beats my old freebsd server :P I couldn’t find any good Server Admin screen shots on the net, so I put some up (click for more):

no title

2008-02-24T00:08:51+01:00

theory: casual piracy = good for microsoft, but they can’t have that position officially because then their shareholders would sue them. Thus, they make it very annoying to use a legit version (WGA, etc) of Windows, which will help spread warezed versions of windows, thus making sure windows is on every machine everywhere, even on macs.

Realtime acoustics modeling in games: Prototype "Aurora2D", v1.1

2008-02-22T02:40:00+01:00

I’m writing my candidate thesis on realtime acoustics modeling in games; figuring out the reverb, echoes and occlusion of sound in a room by doing a physics simulation, specifically image-source model, roughly as described by Jeffrey Borish in his “Extension of the image model to arbitrary polyhedra”. I’ve spent a day or two a week for the past eight weeks or so building a 2D prototype called Aurora2D, before I implement the modeling inside the RMS game engine. Finally, it’s sorta working. I’ve coaxed the RMS sound engine into Aurora2D, so you can actually hear the model in real time. Since it works, I thought I’d publish it here :)

This stuff is pretty cool for (mac) programmers, because it’s a garbage collected Objective-C/C++ hybrid using Core Animation and NSOperationQueue, which means it’s massively multi-threaded. For you, the sources are available at svn://nevyn.nu/school/trunk/realtime_acoustics/Implementation/Aurora2D.

I’m hoping that this will also excite gamers, since most sound effects done in games today are just either baked into the sound file with no accounting for the physical environment in which it is playing whatsoever, or the sound gets some basic DSP effects applied to it, only taking into account as much as the level designer could know at level creation time. However, with today’s computers, we can do so much more. We have multicore CPUs, multicore graphic cards, multicore physics cards in some cases. Why is so little done with audio? Perhaps you can’t, and that’ll be what I find out when I do this in 3D, but I really doubt it.

Anyway. Enough talking. Download Aurora2D v1.1! (Mac Intel 10.5 only)

The interface has evolved for my debugging use only, and is probably confusing for human beings. The above illustration will probably only serve to add to this confusion. Click on the image for a larger version.

Ironic Sans: Idea: A new typography term

2008-02-21T20:12:09+01:00

Ironic Sans: Idea: A new typography term

Software Archaeology Find #3: Another Kind of Object Orientation

2008-02-20T21:52:00+01:00

public void login(Actor pactor) {

    mActor = pactor;

    ClientLogin loginActor = new ClientLogin();

    loginActor.setUsername(pactor.getUsername());

    loginActor.setPassword(pactor.getPassword());

    loginActor = (ClientLogin) pactor;

    Actor ac = new Actor();

    ac.setUsername(loginActor.getUsername());

    ac.setPassword(loginActor.getPassword());

    updateActor(ac);

    //TODO: This should be uncommented for the final version
    //mClient.clientLogin(loginActor);

}

< Previous archaeology find | Next archaeology find >

no title

2008-02-19T02:32:21+01:00

The Loudness War (via )

Internet Software Patents

2008-02-17T22:48:07+01:00

Internet Software Patents

Actually a description of how everything cool relating to computering and the Internet was already envisioned in the ‘60s. A good read.

Reasons why Visual Studio Sucks #3: Hard-to-overview build results

2008-02-17T22:07:00+01:00

The build results window in Visual Studio is plain text. No color coding, no UI elements, just text. This means that you’ll have to scan and read the text to find out if the build was successful, slightly at fault, or a major fuckup. If I recall correctly, the entire build command is output to the window as well, with no soft wrapping, so that the actual error is probably a few thousand pixels to the right, meaning you’ll have to scroll left and right just to read the error message, or even find out if it was an error or a warning. Even if that’s not the case, it’s hard to get an overview over the build process in Visual Studio. There’s a completely different build results pane you can look at instead, which /does/ have color coding and a nice table view. However, you don’t get to see the entire error message, the pane is buggy and displays errors in weird order, and it doesn’t correlate the error to a specific file in a good way. And you can’t easilly get to the corresponding build command to read the exact details of the error.

Once again, please correct me if I’m wrong, even flame me if it’s appropriate. I don’t use Visual Studio that much, and this is mostly taken from memory.

In XCode, if you open the lower pane and click once on an error (double click takes you to the error in the code, as usual), the lower pane scrolls to reveal relevant compiler output.

< Previous suckitude

Reasons why Visual Studio Sucks #2: No real project find [SORTA-KINDA REDACTED]

2008-02-17T21:35:00+01:00

In any sane IDE, when you do a project-wide search, you get a search result summary and a result count, allowing you to refine the search if it’s too general, and else jump directly to the relevant files.

In Visual Studio, Project Find works like file find. When you click Find Next, you just get thrown to the next file containing the phrase. No summary, no order, no find count. Just haphazard teleportation through your project, with no overview and a complete sense of loss of control. Euggh.

Update: It seems Visual Studio does indeed have Project Find. It looks completely botchered, though: No result highlights, no file grouping, and no options to refine the search without redoing it entirely. But it’s certainly better than nothing! ctrl-shift-F to bring it forth. Thanks to Eddie Willman and Patrik Sjöberg for sending this in.

(ps. No, I’m not actively trying to make XCode look cool and fancy, and Visual Studio look like crap: that drop shadow is added automatically when you screen shot a single window in mac os)

< Previous suckitude | Next suckitude >

Reasons why Visual Studio Sucks #1: MDI

2008-02-17T21:33:00+01:00

I really don’t like working in Visual Studio, but when people ask me why, I can’t put my finger to it, and I can’t recall any specific reasons. Thus, I’ll write them here whenever I come up with a reason. You’re very welcome to refute the arguments in the comments.

Reason 1: MDI. ‘Nuff said.

Next suckitude >

After I walked away and plotted my path directly from the Apple store to the nearest Gamestop, I noticed a really weird feeling. My hands were literally craving the feeling of the [MacBook Air] keyboard. It was as if they missed the physical experience of resting on that keyboard.

2008-02-17T21:23:20+01:00

After I walked away and plotted my path directly from the Apple store to the nearest Gamestop, I noticed a really weird feeling. My hands were literally craving the feeling of the [MacBook Air] keyboard. It was as if they missed the physical experience of resting on that keyboard.

—Macbook Airはきれいですよ！ [The .NET Addict’s Blog]. Maybe I’ll reconsider getting one anyway :P

Nevyn's First Rule of Singleton Evilness

2008-02-17T19:14:00+01:00

I finally figured out a litmus test for whether being a singleton is okay or evil for a particular class:

If a class is thread-safe and has no state that can be changed, it may be a singleton.

NSFileManager: OK. RMS::Sound::Gateway: Not so much.

I suppose there are ways to circumvent this rule; e g most of Apple’s singletons may be created either through the+[defaultManager] method, or instantiated on-the-spot, e g if you want several separate NSNotificationCenter inside the same application.

This discussion came up during the creation of the RMS game engine, among many other times. Now that I’m ripping out parts of the engine for re-use, I realize that it was a very bad design decision to use singletons the way we did. For example, my 2D modeler prototype for my candidate thesis is document-based, thus it needs an RMS::Sound::Gateway for each window. This is no-can-do until I fix the code, because for example the Voice class has the delegated play method, and the way it works is that it gets the global gateway and adds itself to the gateway’s list of playing voices.

“State that can be changed”? Oh, right. +[NSColor redColor] has state, but it can still be a singleton since that state can’t be changed by my code. Same for NSEvent’s singleton methods, and so on.

intriguing is it a macbook or a macbook pro via

2008-02-16T08:08:54+01:00

Intriguing! Is it a MacBook, or a MacBook Pro? via engadget.com

no title

2008-02-16T08:04:39+01:00

Where does the “I am intrigued by your ideas and wish to subscribe to your newsletter” meme come from?

Valve releases SteamWorks toolset for free

2008-02-16T01:26:11+01:00

Valve releases SteamWorks toolset for free

GeForce 8 graphics processors to gain PhysX support

2008-02-16T00:44:46+01:00

GeForce 8 graphics processors to gain PhysX support

Software Archaeology Find #2: Enterprise-y

2008-02-13T02:04:00+01:00

int role = Constants.DOCTOR;
switch (res.getInt(2)) {

    case Constants.DOCTOR:

        role = Constants.DOCTOR;

        break;

    case Constants.NURSE:

        role = Constants.NURSE;

        break;

    case Constants.ASSISTANT_NURSE:

        role = Constants.ASSISTANT_NURSE;

        break;

}

< Previous archaeology find | Next archaeology find >

huh windows mobile with something that looks like

2008-02-12T00:53:06+01:00

Huh. Windows Mobile with something that looks like a very interesting UI? Meh, it’s probably another HTC Touch-ism: nice innovation-y candy crust on top of moldy 80’s-looking Windows Mobile UI.
via engadget.com

Not sure why Core Audio isn't an Objective C API

2008-02-11T21:59:00+01:00

It’s for performance, right? It’s the only good reason I can think of. And, you know, it sounds sensible. I mean, ultra-low latency and all that, you probably don’t want that objc dispatch overhead.

I just did an experiment, however. I dislike working with C APIs, so I’m writing Cocoa wrappers for Core Audio, just exposing those pesky Component properties that take five lines to set or get, with simple methods. Suddenly I thought, “Wait, what if I try to use an objc method as a render callback? Those require very low latency and are called often. So I should be seeing some of that objc overhead.”.

Very unscientific comparison, comparing a simple sine renderer in c and objc, on an MBP 1.83x2 (source available on request):

CPU usage in app using C callback: 3.0%
CPU usage in app using ObjC callback: 3.1%

This isn’t, by far, any compelling evidence that Core Audio should be Objective C; I’m just saying it seems more feasible than I originally thought it’d be. Also, actually thinking about the problem, I realize that the callback’s only called 44100/512 ≈ 86 times a second and has about 10 ms to complete (astronomically long in computer terms).

But NeXT did it that way, didn’t they? I want to remember that NeXT had basically /everything/ in objc, including drivers and audio and such things. So, why not Mac OS X? NeXT was hardly known for being a slow OS. Tell me what I’m missing in the comments.

It’s not enough to slap the Ender’s Game name on just any game—it has to be exciting, memorable, and endlessly replayable

2008-02-10T08:17:35+01:00

It’s not enough to slap the Ender’s Game name on just any game—it has to be exciting, memorable, and endlessly replayable

—Awesome, an Ender’s Game game! Based on the Battle Room concept. An FPS without gravity! Can’t wait to play it. Ars Technica: The enemy’s gate is DOWN: Unreal-powered Ender’s Game incoming (via Rui Carmo)

no title

2008-02-09T23:14:03+01:00

(Original på youtube, via Hjalle)

via thedailywtfcom

2008-02-07T04:16:59+01:00

via thedailywtf.com

the things team are either perfectionists or are

2008-02-04T20:55:00+01:00

The Things team are either perfectionists or are just very, very indecisive :P

via culturedcode.com.

apples pages reads microsoft wordfiles better

2008-02-04T15:59:00+01:00

Apple’s Pages reads Microsoft Wordfiles better than Microsoft Word.

People procrastinate due to two reasons: The outcome of the task is or has become insignificant to you or because you think that the task itself is bigger than you and therefore you don’t feel comfortable to control it.

2008-02-01T17:49:38+01:00

People procrastinate due to two reasons: The outcome of the task is or has become insignificant to you or because you think that the task itself is bigger than you and therefore you don’t feel comfortable to control it.

—David Allen via “Stop Procrastination Now.pdf” via my girlfriend. Yes, by writing this, I am procrastinating.

Software Archaeology Find #1: Labyrinths

2008-01-31T16:48:00+01:00

Just a sample of the wonderful file structure we’re trying to make sense of and reorganize from an old project.

E:\archive\backup\tsr\old\x. en knippe blandade prisma-virtue-old-new\discern\2002-09-10 current_build\current_build_old\2002-08-01 current_build\sessions\dice\textures\house.jpg

Next archaeology find >

96 Characters Ought To Be Enough For Anyone — Thought Palace

2008-01-31T07:31:13+01:00

96 Characters Ought To Be Enough For Anyone — Thought Palace

I really like his third footnote (thanks to Ahruman from #macdev for showing me this nugget)

real time acoustics modeling in games 2d

2008-01-30T14:13:00+01:00

Real-Time Acoustics Modeling in Games: 2D prototype, almost done. Yes, this is the application which uses CoreAnimation, NSOperationQueue and the garbage collector all at once.

These are my children. They join me on all my journeys.

2008-01-30T01:21:00+01:00

So I use a lot of small utility classes that just jump between projects. Not enough to warrant a library, but still code I can’t live without. For example, ary(id first, …) instead of [NSArray arrayWithObjects:…], dict(id key, id value, …) for a dictionary, sf(NSString *format, …) instead of [NSString stringWithFormat:…], a zooming and delta-scrollable CALayer, vector class with most linear algebra, line class, simple macros to turn of CoreAnimation animations… You get the point.

Anyways, from my last blog entry you might have gathered that NSOperationQueue, CoreAnimation and garbage collection don’t really work well together. It seems to be a problem with ensuring that only a single is committing changes/transactions at a time (hence a crash in CALayerEnsureTransaction). NSOperationQueue sets up a full thread with a run loop for every single operation. I have no idea why they chose this wasteful approach; personally, I’d reuse a set of threads. And since NSOperationQueue isn’t working, and my entire acoustic modeling simulation is built around NSOperations, I decided to do just that. Thus, FakeOperationQueue joins my army of utility classes. It has the exact same interface as NSOperationQueue (almost, I only covered what I use), and works on NSOperations. Note that it doesn’t consider dependencies! It’s a very simple class, only a hundred lines of code.

Rentzsch seemed somewhat interested in my fake queue. Thus, I decided I might as well put my stuff online.

FakeOperationQueue.m FakeOperationQueue.h
NCCommon.m NCCommon.h – ary, sf, dict; foreact macro stolen from somewhere; probably more
BNZVector.m BNZVector.h (I was planning to join a contest for BNZ but I enver got around to it, hence the prefix)
BNZLine.m BNZLine.h BNZLineTest.m
CALayerAdditions.m CALayerAdditions.h
CAScrollDeltaLayer.m CAScrollDeltaLayer.h – Sort of embarrasing code, I’m probably mixing some spaces up, but it’s very handy when scrolling from -[NSResponder mouseDragged] with mouse deltas

I do not trust the Objective-C 2.0 Garbage Collector

2008-01-25T00:55:06+01:00

Why? Because I crash inside the collector thread. And because it’s young. And because it seems I’m the only one on this planet building an application involving both the GC, CoreAnimation and NSOperationQueue. They’re a perfect fit, but no one has ever crashed where I do, it seems.

For example, let this be the first and only hit on google for CALayerEnsureTransaction: CALayerEnsureTransaction.

Another example. Let this be the first and only hit on google for Auto::Thread::scan_other_thread: Auto::Thread::scan_other_thread.

And it was so.

Yes, I’m frustrated.

via katebeatoncom awesome

2008-01-22T21:04:09+01:00

via katebeaton.com. Awesome!

I have newprojectitis

2008-01-22T04:40:00+01:00

Pullsar: Starting up.

2008-01-22T01:10:00+01:00

Pull Stars from Mario Galaxy is just way too much fun, don’t you think? So do I. So I set out to make a game based on that very concept.

I’m doing it in the same vein of openness as Warren Marshall over at Wanton Hubris, where he documented every step of making his Quake 1 editor ToeTag. Okay, maybe I’m taking it a step further and yet another step too far; I recorded the full hour of development I put into this first prototype. In it you might find some neat Core Animation tricks, or at least get you started on your own CA apps. Note though that I’m using a View as a Controller and doing some generally bad design, just to get started quickly. Also, I’ll try to cut it down to the essentials in maybe a five min vid when I have time.

Check out the project site with all the material at http://thirdcog.eu/apps/pullsar.

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2008-01-22T01:08:04+01:00

Great soldering advice from CuriousInventor. “Surface Mount Soldering 101”. I’m really not good at soldering, so I’ll definitely get the equiment he recommends and try his techniques next time…

Three Points On Error Handling

2008-01-21T08:09:00+01:00

I’ve been ranting on Twitter lately about how to do error checking the wrong way. Coincidentally, the latest topic on Mac Developer Roundtable was about just that, error handling.

I don’t think this episode of MDR was very interesting. It was essentially an overview of the three common error handling strategies (exceptions, enum returns, pass-by-ref error object), and some general C++/Java likeage from Uli (which is not a compliment :P). However, it got me writing a real blog entry, which is a good thing :)

So: Three things kept repeating in my head while I listened to MDR#3, hoping that someone’d mention it so that we can rid the world of more bad code.

First off, stay far far away from nested ifs. I don’t remember which Mac dev blog I read it on, maybe Wil Shipley’s or ridiculous_fish, but whoever it was recommended to always try to keep the code as far to the left as possible. Use the outermost block for the common, correct case, and use inner blocks for error cases. What I mean by this is, check for the error condition and treat it in-place, don’t check for the not-error case and treat the error in an else far far away. An example is in order…


// Don't:
void collectPhazon() {
  PhazonDetector *detector = findNearestPhazonDetector();
  if(detector) {
    Phazon *nearestPhazon = detector->scanForPhazon();
    if(nearestPhazon) {
      sendPhazonCollectorDrone(nearestPhazon->position());
    } else {
      beep(kNoPhazonFoundBeep);
    }
  } else {
    beep(kMajorlyCatastrophicErrorBeep);
  }
}

// Do:
void collectPhazon() {
  PhazonDetector *detector = findNearestPhazonDetector();
  if(!detector) { beep(kMajorlyCatastrophicErrorBeep); return; }
  
  Phazon *nearestPhazon = detector->scanForPhazon();
  if(!nearestPhazon) { beep(kNoPhazonFoundBeep); return; }
  
  sendPhazonCollectorDrone(nearestPhazon->position());
}

This also applies to smaller scopes, such as for and while loops. Instead of having a big if block inside the loop, say if(error_condition) continue;. Feel free to use gotos as well, eg:


  Baz *a() {
    ...
    if(error) goto a_cleanup;

    return myBaz;
  a_cleanup:
    free(myBaz);
    fclose(bazHandle);
    return NULL;
  }

The same effect can be achieved with try-catch-finally, so use whichever makes your code the easiest to understand.

Secondly, never use just a boolean NO or a nil return value as an error return for a method or function that can fail in more than one way. If you do, the user of your library (or yourself, if it’s in your app!) can’t know what actually went wrong.

This leads to error dialogs such as “Couldn’t connect to iPod” – why not? Because one isn’t connected? Because it’s the wrong model? Because I hit it with a hammer? The sentence is lacking a ‘because’ because the reason is hidden behind bad abstractions.

This is where NSError is your friend, and I think that this is the answer to Scotty’s burning question: 'When should I use NSError’? The answer is simple: whenver there’s more than one way to fail; whenver a NO/nil can mean more than one kind of failure.

Third, and this was actually mentioned, if you’re checking for errors, make sure you understand /why/ you’re checking for that error, and what the logical response is.

This snippet from Apple’s sample “ComplexPlayThru” is a perfect example of how not to do it (ComplexPlayThru.cpp, line 353-354):


  comp = FindNextComponent(NULL, &desc);
  if (comp == NULL) exit (-1);

Nice! My app suddenly disappeared with no explanation whatsoever! And I’m sure no other part of the app uses the error code ’-1’! Awesome. Also, the component that they’re looking for is an Apple default, must-be-there-or-any-sound-app-will-crash component. It’s safe to assume that it will always be there, and just skip the error check.

This also goes against Gus’ advice: please don’t just copy any sample code you find, even if it’s from Apple.

Guitar Wizard

2008-01-21T04:48:54+01:00

Guitar Wizard

Nice. Guitar Hero with a real guitar! So, once I master GH3, maybe I can get this and /actually/ learn to play the guitar ;) Also, check out Piano Wizard. What I don’t get though, is why market it for kids when it looks great for anyone who wants to learn to play the piano?

IT-chefen som slutade skratta

2008-01-21T01:53:00+01:00

IT-chefen som slutade skratta

Det är lite som Per säger, ibland vill man bara bli potatisodlare :P

Fast just att jobba inom management är väl det sista jag kan tänka mig… Heléne i artikeln: “[det kändes] som om jag inte gjorde något som var till någon nytta”. Rui Carmo brukar säga att hans liv är en exakt replika av Dilbert.

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2008-01-20T01:40:00+01:00

Head tracking, step 1: Wiimote point tracking in 101 lines of code.
(Music is Frank Martiniq - Cellar Door)

NSURLConnection, rails, apache, spaces in URLs and "Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand"

2008-01-19T07:10:00+01:00

My Rails application uses redirect_to at one point in my code where it redirects to a pdf document on an apache server. The URL that it redirects to contains spaces. URLs may not contain spaces. redirect_to does not escape these spaces, but issues a ‘302 Found’ redirect response with the unescaped URL.

When my Cocoa application receives this redirect request through the currently running NSURLConnection, it follows the new url. In 10.4, it escaped the URL before sending the GET request. In 10.5, this is no longer the case, and apache (correctly) barfs on the request with

Bad Request
Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.

The request line contained invalid characters following the protocol string.

The solution is simple: URI::escape the URL before redirecting to it. The big question however, is: Is this a bug in my code, in Rails, or in Cocoa?

I’m guessing first or second; I’m supposing there’s a very good reason why Apple chose to change the behaviour of NSURLConnection. Also, the Rails documentation does say, String starting with protocol:// (like http://): Is passed straight through as the target for redirection, which would put the responsibility square on me. However, Rails is generating an invalid response, so I’ll go with blaming rails.

AOL adopting XMPP aka Jabber

2008-01-18T23:02:16+01:00

AOL adopting XMPP aka Jabber

AOL is obviously one step ahead, in any case. A giant leap, really, not just opening the protocol but changing to a completely OSS protocol. Nice!

Messenger 9 API unveiled at Georgia Tech presentation

2008-01-18T23:01:17+01:00

Messenger 9 API unveiled at Georgia Tech presentation

Am I reading this right? Is Microsoft opening up their MSN protocol? No more reverse engineering?

taken with my iphone when walking to school

2008-01-16T22:58:00+01:00

Taken with my iPhone when walking to school.

me my girlfriend and some neighbors gathered to

2008-01-16T22:57:00+01:00

Me, my girlfriend, and some neighbors gathered to “watch” MacWorld and the MacBook Air announcement – which meant refreshing macrumors.com and following the livechatting on #macintosh on irc.arstechnica.com, all on my HDTV.

Yes, we are nerds :P

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2008-01-11T10:23:41+01:00

Welcome, @voxar, to the world of Twitter :)

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2008-01-11T08:51:26+01:00

I second @RogueAmoeba – Airfoil 3 IS awesome! Been using it for months. It can do 0.2 sec latency if you only transmit to computers.

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2008-01-11T08:45:34+01:00

WTF? TextEdit just did a get a getattrlist on all (?) files in my /Games folder, for no obvious reason. I haven’t used TextEdit in hours.

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2008-01-11T08:22:21+01:00

Today’s adventure: Using the computer with fs_usage in the background all day. I knew my computer swapped, but *that much*? Ouch.

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2008-01-11T05:12:00+01:00

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2008-01-11T04:45:55+01:00

Why on earth do I have to tell Spotlight not to index my TimeMachine *backup*?

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2008-01-10T12:28:28+01:00

@bmf two-three years ago a few classmates I spoke with thought the Internet was a big, big computer somewhere. Explaining didn’t help :P

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2008-01-10T09:42:21+01:00

Damnit! Why doesn’t AULab allow using many devices at once? I want to input from one audio device and output to another.

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2008-01-10T09:21:19+01:00

Airfoil users, rejoice! http://thirdcog.eu/apps/soundflower

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2008-01-10T07:58:37+01:00

@rentzsch: Fission

Soundflower with volume controls

2008-01-10T03:08:00+01:00

Soundflower with volume controls

I spent a day or two procrastinating, writing a patch for Soundflower I’ve wanted to write for years. Adds volume, gain, balance and mute support to all Soundflower virtual sound devices.

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2008-01-09T20:39:15+01:00

panic(cpu 0 caller 0x001A7BED): Kernel trap at 0x343121d1, type 14=page fault. All this just to get surround sound *with* volume controls.

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2008-01-09T12:12:23+01:00

Just got my first kernel panic from driver development. yay! Any ideas on how to make this less painful? (adding vol ctrl to soundflower)

the dinovo mini has a dedicated ctrl alt del

2008-01-08T06:57:00+01:00

The diNovo Mini has a dedicated ctrl-alt-del button. Need I say more?

Day Break: Best show I've seen in 2007

2008-01-08T01:55:58+01:00

Day Break: Best show I've seen in 2007

Better than Heroes and Lost imo. It just gets better and better for each episode, and the ending is awesome.

is cynergy blatantly ripping off apples bonjour

2008-01-04T05:51:00+01:00

Is Cynergy blatantly ripping off Apple’s Bonjour logo, or is the shape too simple?

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2008-01-03T11:50:31+01:00

Am I the only one getting kCGErrorIllegalArgument in my windowserver.log every time I switch windows?

Mr. Random Is My Friend

2008-01-02T05:40:00+01:00

This is Mr. Random.

21:35:26 nevyn@xephon:~$ cat bin/rnd
  #!/usr/bin/env ruby
  class Array
    def random
      self[Kernel.rand(self.length)]
    end
  end


  if $0 == __FILE__
    puts $*.random
  end

This is how you use Mr. Random.

21:38:38 nevyn@xephon:~$ rnd pizza chinese leftovers
leftovers

The best thing is how it makes you realize what you don’t want.

21:38:50 nevyn@xephon:~$ rnd pizza
pizza

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2008-01-02T03:59:08+01:00

Also, it’d be interesting to instrument what happens when I log in… It takes more than five minutes before the hd stops thrashing

Stepwise has been taken down

2007-12-24T19:47:50+01:00

Stepwise has been taken down

Wow. I knew Rixstep was an idiot; I didn’t know he was an ass as well.

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2007-12-23T19:53:20+01:00

I wonder if those patches are available for download somewhere. That would be awesome.

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2007-12-10T08:36:14+01:00

Won’t you blog about this song?

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2007-12-03T05:56:18+01:00

David and Dania performing their quick change act on America’s Got Talent

saturn ciclopsorg via presentation zen

2007-11-24T20:28:00+01:00

Saturn, ciclops.org via Presentation Zen

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2007-11-24T20:10:55+01:00

TED | Talks | Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law (video). Best use of presentation slideware I’ve ever seen.

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2007-11-24T19:37:51+01:00

Severn Suzuki, giving an amazing speak at UN Earth Summit 1992

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2007-11-24T05:59:24+01:00

Amazing Hand Shadow show by Raymond Crowe

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2007-11-24T01:14:36+01:00

Please watch this even if you don’t understand a word of Swedish :P

Enterprise-y

2007-11-23T18:19:00+01:00

YesNoFactory.getFactoryInstance().YES.getDescription().

equals(array[0].toUpperCase());

Taking a Good Thing Too Far - Worse Than Failure

How Addicted to Apple Are You?

2007-11-22T07:10:42+01:00

80%

Study after study has shown that happy workers are productive workers and productive workers make more money for their capitalistic overlords. Is standardizing on Internet Explorer really worth more than that?

2007-11-20T20:19:53+01:00

Study after study has shown that happy workers are productive workers and productive workers make more money for their capitalistic overlords. Is standardizing on Internet Explorer really worth more than that?

—An Entirely Other Day - I’ve Got a New Attitude

The programmer, though, wants to be involved deeply and profoundly in just a few projects — he wants to own them, top to bottom. Maybe it’s a whole program, or a single feature, or some underlying library. Whatever. He wants to live in it, neck-deep. He has to worry about all — literally all — of the obscure technical details that make computers go. Jumping between projects — context switching — is a great way to burn a programmer out, because the cost of unloading one project from his head only to load up another one is enormously high. The idea of switching between two projects in a day, much less ten, is not only exhausting, but depressing.

2007-11-20T20:16:32+01:00

The programmer, though, wants to be involved deeply and profoundly in just a few projects — he wants to own them, top to bottom. Maybe it’s a whole program, or a single feature, or some underlying library. Whatever. He wants to live in it, neck-deep. He has to worry about all — literally all — of the obscure technical details that make computers go. Jumping between projects — context switching — is a great way to burn a programmer out, because the cost of unloading one project from his head only to load up another one is enormously high. The idea of switching between two projects in a day, much less ten, is not only exhausting, but depressing.

—An Entirely Other Day - Wide vs. Deep

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2007-11-20T03:12:26+01:00

Learning optical illusions with Whitest Boy Alive

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2007-11-19T23:11:28+01:00

Dear gigantic Google database,

It’s possible to install Mac OS X 10.5 Server onto a GUID-formatted harddrive on an Intel mac, and then put the drive into a Mac PPC G5 dual 2.0 tower, and it’ll boot and run fantastically, even though it’s not APT/APM.

Now you know.

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2007-11-16T05:01:19+01:00

My system.log is now 302 megabytes. I get about ten of these a second:

“… ISyncSession deleteRecordWithIdentifier: ignoring delete for unknown record …”

WTF?

no title

2007-11-13T19:22:00+01:00

rdar://5596766:
Summary

Switching to an application when you don’t have a window open in it in the current space, switches to a space that does. This is okay for many applications. It’s not okay for an application that you are likely to use on many spaces simultaneously, such as Safari or the Terminal.

Steps to reproduce

1. Open a Safari browser on your developer space, Space 1.
2. Go to Space 3 to check your mail.
3. Notice the interesting feed item from Daring Fireball
4. Command-Tab to Safari to navigate to daringfireball.net
5. Feel the draft as all your mail-related windows fly by and you are transported to your developer space, putting you completely out of context feeling slightly embarrased for your act of procrastination being exposed so rudely to XCode.

Expected results

At step 0, I would go to the Spaces system preferences to set Safari to be an application that is available on *any* space (which is NOT the same as *all* spaces). See also http://blog.elliottcable.name/articles/2007/11/spaces-solution.

In step 4, focus would be given to Safari and its menubar be frontmost, and that’s all that would happen. No swooshing to another Space.

Regression

Sometimes, even clicking on a link in Mail gets you swooshing to another space. That’s another, unrelated bug, however.

A visual tour of Android's UI - Engadget

2007-11-13T04:56:26+01:00

A visual tour of Android's UI - Engadget

Not impressed. Possibly better than SonyEricsson’s (my current favorite among the ones I’ve tested), but not impressively so.

via wwwgeekculturecom

2007-11-07T19:24:01+01:00

via www.geekculture.com

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2007-11-07T07:30:30+01:00

You only need to go to their site and get a quick whiff of the Enterprise-y smell to realize that Android feels too much corporate and too little google to be likely to be awesome. Please prove me wrong.

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2007-11-06T01:05:48+01:00

TED Talks | Aubrey de Grey: Why we age and how we can avoid it

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2007-11-05T21:39:00+01:00

[In Swedish again] DEL TVÅ av föregående video. Blir sugen på att flytta till Shanghai… :P

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2007-11-05T21:32:34+01:00

[In swedish] Fredrik Härén om kunskap. Pwnzar ett helt land!

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2007-11-05T06:13:29+01:00

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2007-11-05T01:28:53+01:00

Great demo for running Windows seamlessly on a Mac.

It turns out that EBS works so well that all you have to do is keep the clock running on whatever task you were doing when the interruption occurred. As disconcerting as this may sound, EBS produces the best results when you do this.

2007-11-02T08:24:43+01:00

It turns out that EBS works so well that all you have to do is keep the clock running on whatever task you were doing when the interruption occurred. As disconcerting as this may sound, EBS produces the best results when you do this.

—Evidence Based Scheduling - Joel on Software. I might just have to use FogBugz on my next project.

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2007-11-02T02:10:00+01:00

(For those that aren’t ultra-mac-nerds, this is a follow up on “Fixing God’s Horrible Mistake’s Fix”, which was a followup to “Fixing God’s Horrible Mistake”. Movie downloadable from my site).

PC Memory: Just the Facts

2007-10-22T22:08:24+02:00

PC Memory: Just the Facts

At Tom’s Hardware. Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about DDR RAM, and probably a whole lot more.

The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence

2007-10-21T01:29:06+02:00

The complexity of software is an essential property, not an accidental one. Hence, descriptions of a software entity that abstract away its complexity often abstract away its essence

—Software Is Hard quoting Fred Brooks in

Software Is Hard

2007-10-21T01:25:26+02:00

Software Is Hard

The whole thing is great. Had to link to it again.

We build systems like the Wright brothers built airplanes–build the whole thing, push it off the cliff, let it crash, and start over again

2007-10-21T01:22:51+02:00

We build systems like the Wright brothers built airplanes–build the whole thing, push it off the cliff, let it crash, and start over again

—Software Is Hard quoting the 1968 NATO Software Software Engineering Conference.

(bash #17403)

2007-09-30T07:40:56+02:00

Seam carving in bad code

2007-09-22T06:38:48+02:00

So Carmo wrote about some seam carving code written in Qt by Gabe Rudy, and how it wouldn’t compile in XCode. What I’m wondering is, however, how it ever compiled in anything. See, for some reason Gabe decided to use Yet Another Image Library (like there aren’t enough half-assed image libraries out there) that was written in C in his C++ code. Without declaring it extern C. So Gabe’s code would be looking for the wonderful function signature L__Z10createMaskii$stub instead of _createMask.

I fixed ‘em up with some #ifdef __cplusplus. Here’s the source and binaries for your enjoyment. Oh, but before you joyfully go download it, be warned: the resizing is not in real time.

The point of any company should be to make customers want to give it money, NOT to get money from customers. It’s a subtle distinction that is the difference between good and evil.

2007-09-21T04:40:52+02:00

The point of any company should be to make customers want to give it money, NOT to get money from customers. It’s a subtle distinction that is the difference between good and evil.

—Call Me Fishmeal: iPhone & iPod: contain or disengage?

Box collision with inverse/incorrect physics and force lines

2007-09-18T23:03:27+02:00

Box collision with inverse/incorrect physics and force lines

Doing coding for homework ends up being way too much fun sometimes ;)

Water and technology do not blend well.

2007-09-18T19:35:20+02:00

I recently took a long, steamy hot shower, while my Gadget Pants hung on a hook on the wall. This hasn’t been a problem before. However, this shower must have been extra steamy, for all did not go well. My phone got a steamy display for an hour but that went away, the DS didn’t even notice, but my PSP… My beautiful original Japan-imported 1.5 firmware PSP, which gave me heaps of coding fun and a trip to Amsterdam, gave up the ghost. The screen has blotches all over it, the D-pad presses right all the time, the memory stick slot has corroded and won’t read anything properly, the UMD reader won’t spin, and the whole thing freezes randomly, which could be the result of any of the former or of yet another broken component inside it. In other words, it’s broken beyond repair. This is a sad, sad day.

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2007-09-13T23:43:05+02:00

BioShock review by The Escapist. Great deal of fun.

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2007-08-31T22:43:42+02:00

360° Light Field Display (via Engadget)

Phone Scoop - HTC Touch

2007-08-30T21:17:47+02:00

Phone Scoop - HTC Touch

HTC’s additions to Windows Mobile look really nice, actually. Pretty thought-through touch UI. BUT… They’ve just tacked it onto Windows, and most apps are still stylus-based, with 4x4 pixel widgets and general ugliness. I wish they had gone all the way, replacing all apps, especially text input. Then it might actually have been a worthy opponent to the iPhone.

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2007-08-29T00:14:32+02:00

Content-Aware Image Sizing (via PC Feber). Hella smart algoritm! And so simple!

On making the Ultimate Machine

2007-08-25T20:24:31+02:00

Sony knows hardware but they don’t know shit about fun games or UI.
Nintendo knows fun games but they know shit about online gaming.
Microsoft knows online gaming but they also don’t know shit about UI.
Apple knows UI but they don’t know shit about… well, gaming.

If they joined forces, it’d be the most awesome gaming machine mankind has ever seen. But instead they compete and put out mediocre products and praise them to the skies, even though they completely lack what their competitors have and are really only good in one way each.

PhotoRec - Recover photos from broken memory cards

2007-08-22T23:25:23+02:00

PhotoRec - Recover photos from broken memory cards

What an amazing tool! It saved a whole memory card full of files for me, even though both the camera, a windows machine and my Mac said the card contained zero pictures!

This requires complete redesign of the sound engine in the Flash Player which dates from circa 1996 and has not been improved since.

2007-08-22T19:26:45+02:00

This requires complete redesign of the sound engine in the Flash Player which dates from circa 1996 and has not been improved since.

—kaourantin.net: What just happened to video on the web?

Sparkle deploy script with zipping and dsa signing

2007-08-22T01:46:48+02:00

Sparkle deploy script with zipping and dsa signing

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2007-08-20T20:31:50+02:00

All you have to do is look at this blog. I blog on about about a youtube video a day. I cry when I read my browser history and realize what I have really been doing all fucking day and all the days before it in an infinite chain of procrastination. I have at least two app ideas that would really make a difference if I got them out there, and at least a dozen started projects that are fun to code on and hopefully to use.

I’m feeling a desperate need to stop blogging, stop reading feeds, stop wasting time on wikipedia, and really doing something.

I think this about once a week. There’ll probably be a youtube video in this space before the day is over.

Mike Lee’s stupid post made me feel that about my whole life and not just my this immediate moment, though. Thanks a lot.

I was born a programmer. The rest is just implementation detail.

2007-08-20T20:21:35+02:00

I was born a programmer. The rest is just implementation detail.

—This is so profound I’m almost crying with rage. My life’s too simple, I go through life like I’m looking out a train window and just waiting for my destination, and I have produced nothing of consequence.

My call in life is programming. This much is clear. Now I must accomplish something with it, or forever hate myself.

i visited ladonia with my girlfriend and her

2007-08-19T21:45:03+02:00

I visited Ladonia with my girlfriend and her family yesterday.

no title

2007-08-19T04:37:35+02:00

What if business meetings were like blog comment threads?

no i do not feel particularly inclined to give up

2007-08-17T21:47:34+02:00

No, I do not feel particularly inclined to give up my lovely host at loopia to let a fucking snail mail spammer handle my domain! (Do not use Domain Registry of America (London, England). Just the name should be a giveaway … But I bet a lot of people get tricked to pay them anyway because of the deliberately tricky way the letter is written. I almost fell for it myself the first time.)

the previously mentioned iphone ebook reader from

2007-08-17T20:04:19+02:00

The previously mentioned iPhone ebook reader from Phill Ryu’s blog

5 iPhone Apps I'd Like To See From Apple

2007-08-17T20:02:42+02:00

5 iPhone Apps I'd Like To See From Apple

Some very sweet UI sketchups of potential iPhone apps. I especially like the Ebook reader, it’s beautiful and actually looks usable. (Contrast the reader bundled with my Nokia: it takes about half a minute to open a text file and has neither bookmarks nor line numbers! In other words, utter and complete crap, like the rest of the phone’s GUI.)

no title

2007-08-17T03:34:04+02:00

Spoon - Don’t You Evah feat. Keepon the Dancing Robot! (via Engadget.com) (Also: Keepon dancing to Spoon’s “I Turn My Camera On”!)

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2007-08-15T04:39:09+02:00

Kid Beyond. I needs to get my hands on Live. (Via sterd over IM)

boasas 832

2007-08-14T21:50:09+02:00

boasas #832

Creating standalone [Python] Mac OS X applications

2007-08-10T04:35:01+02:00

Creating standalone [Python] Mac OS X applications

Be Kind Rewind Trailer

2007-08-09T20:44:36+02:00

Be Kind Rewind Trailer

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2007-08-09T20:29:19+02:00

Second Life parody (via lonelysandwich). Note that it’s only funny if you’ve actually played the game or seen gameplay videos.

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2007-08-09T20:17:56+02:00

Copy/paste iPhone concept. Not much of a fan of that copy method, but the video is awesome. (Via Engadget)

Insanely Great News

2007-08-04T11:28:19+02:00

Insanely Great News

Only Apple would ship a *paperclip* in a specially-designed bag with a specially-designed instructions sheet.

no title

2007-07-31T01:30:06+02:00

Check out the Office Car! Second half is skippable.

It amazes me how little you can say in so many words

2007-07-27T12:03:20+02:00

Continuing Hannspree’s unique lifestyle selections, the company brings you the best of both elegance and simplicity. The XV Series design is remarkable; the range of functions and user-friendly interface brings digital technology into your home, becoming part of your life. XV Series is not only a bold statement of style, it is a dynamic device painstakingly designed to exceed the consumer’s expectations.

Can anyone guess even what kind of product it is?

no title

2007-07-27T09:26:47+02:00

The Avalanches - Frontier Psychiatrist

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2007-07-27T09:26:29+02:00

The Avalanches - Since I Left You

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2007-07-26T02:04:05+02:00

PlayStation 3: Eye of Judgment, an augmented reality game. AuRGs are so cool! (There’s a technical demonstration as well)

Cursorcerer - Hide Your Cursor at Will

2007-07-25T05:13:25+02:00

Cursorcerer - Hide Your Cursor at Will

(Via the Rogue Amoeba blog. By the way, you stole my freakin’ app idea with Airfoil 3! :( Okay, it was a pretty obvious extension, but still…)

On my C distaste

2007-07-24T18:28:00+02:00

I don’t remember where I read it, but I just recalled a quote I read a long time ago. It went something like:

Say you need a status report from a fellow object. In message passing languages (all scripting languages, smalltalk, objc…), you might ask for this report from that object, equivalent to maybe making a call to it, or sending it an email. The C++ equivalent, however, would be like doing open brain surgery on the object, sticking a probe in the open brain, and analyzing the electrical signals in order to find the answer.

The original was phrased better… Anyhow, it was Joe Armstrong that got me thinking about this again; I’m very very curious about Erlang and are feeling very much like implementing a game server in that language, maybe an mmorpg style game, in order to test the concurrency and scalability.

For wishlist: Programming Erlang

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2007-07-24T11:44:54+02:00

Periodic Table of the Internet

2007-07-24T06:20:08+02:00

Periodic Table of the Internet

(Via Anarchaia

15 Unfortunately Placed Ads

2007-07-24T05:51:06+02:00

15 Unfortunately Placed Ads

(via Anarchaia)

once again ive updated the front page of my

2007-07-22T09:36:21+02:00

Once again, I’ve updated the front page of my personal web site, nevyn.nu. Photoshop was fun! Check it out!

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2007-07-22T02:26:11+02:00

Breaking News! The Internet has crashed! (via the projectionist. I bet my parents would actually believe this report as real, at least the beginning of it. Too funny!)

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2007-07-19T19:58:39+02:00

Gold Block Digging Slinky Beats

Polyphasism, Try 2, Day 11

2007-07-19T19:14:29+02:00

Not a single crash, rarely miss a nap by more than five minutes, and this time I haven’t been as tired as last time (read: haven’t been tired enough to cry from exhaustion), although the morning hours after the core sleep is mostly waiting for the next nap, trying to keep my eyes open.

However, I am constantly tired, which sort of defeats the point of this polyphasism. I’ll give it another week, but if that doesn’t work out, I’ll go back to monophasic.

(Oh, and falling asleep while standing up is an interesting experience; hitting the floor isn’t.)

kurtwood smith michael ironside separated at

2007-07-15T21:54:19+02:00

Kurtwood Smith / Michael Ironside - Separated at birth? :P (sorry, only got mspaint here)

The Lone Coda Disliker

2007-07-09T17:58:19+02:00

Am I the only one who don’t like Coda?

I just realized why I don’t like it, too: It’s a Windows application.

You’re cornered into a single window, preferably in fullscreen, navigating your data not by wonderfully spatial windows, but by small, almost identical small evil creatures called ’tabs’.

And instead of presenting data in separate windows, you’re supposed to *switch modes* on these tabs, back and forth, back and forth; either that, or using the other unforgivingly evil Windows UI metaphor: the split pane. Suddenly you have windows again, but they’re deprived of their ability to obscure each other, instead opting for scrolling back and forth, back and forth to see your relevant areas.

Also, its CSS editor sucks badly, at least compared to that app which surely God himself must have sent down to earth.

Implementing Silverlight in 21 Days - Miguel de Icaza

2007-07-08T06:59:15+02:00

Implementing Silverlight in 21 Days - Miguel de Icaza

Post mortem of the initial for Moonlight, a Silverlight clone in Mono. From nothing to complete API compatibility in twenty (20!) days!

You would have to fly on a commercial aircraft every day for 18,000 years before your chances of being in a crash exceeded 50 per cent.

2007-07-08T06:14:10+02:00

You would have to fly on a commercial aircraft every day for 18,000 years before your chances of being in a crash exceeded 50 per cent.

—From Natalie Angier book The Canon, via The Observer (haven’t actually read the book myself)

iPhone serial hacked, full interactive shell

2007-07-07T11:11:06+02:00

iPhone serial hacked, full interactive shell

We have interactive shell. I repeat, we have interactive shell. Via iPhone Dev wiki via Apple TV Hacks.

Triumphant

2007-07-06T21:49:41+02:00

I just had the most amazing dream, all set to Röyksopp’s Triumphant. I don’t remember the dream at all, though, but I certainly remember the music.

Röyksopp - Triumphant

no title

2007-07-05T09:14:17+02:00

The Original Human POLE POSITION Performance. Also: Pong, Space Invaders, more Pong

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2007-07-05T08:27:19+02:00

In a perfect world, ‘lowest common denominator with regards to feature set and quality’ and 'market leader’ are mutually exclusive.

I hate you, Internet Explorer!

my camera was not at the inverness police

2007-07-05T00:37:54+02:00

MY CAMERA WAS NOT AT THE INVERNESS POLICE STATION.

IT IS GONE FOREVER.

Incidentally, they received some MEMORY CARDS but they said THEY DID NOT KEEP THEM. Yes, because who could possibly have lost a memory card FULL OF AWESOME PICTURES and then want it back?

This phone flies in the face of all those who think that 1.0 products must be either fully focused on one task to be done well, or those that consider 1.0 products something you should avoid by default until the next release, you know, the one with all the bugs worked out. […] As others continue to market proudly their “alpha” and “beta” stickers, Apple shows us all, that you can deliver a 1.0 experience that really is complete. […] What it means to be 1.0 will never be the same.

2007-07-03T05:17:09+02:00

This phone flies in the face of all those who think that 1.0 products must be either fully focused on one task to be done well, or those that consider 1.0 products something you should avoid by default until the next release, you know, the one with all the bugs worked out.

[…] As others continue to market proudly their “alpha” and “beta” stickers, Apple shows us all, that you can deliver a 1.0 experience that really is complete. […]

What it means to be 1.0 will never be the same.

—David Weiss: The 1.0 that wasn’t

the joy of tech comic laughter is the best tech

2007-06-29T21:49:27+02:00

The Joy of Tech comic… laughter is the best tech support.

Relaxing

2007-06-29T00:02:09+02:00

I met with a client yesterday, and at the same time with another consultant that I helped get a job for them. He seemed eh, a little bit more professional than me… He actually demanded *deadlines*. I then realized how stupid it was of me to never do the same, to just accept “ASAP!!” as a deadline. So now my projects got a deadline *in the autumn* which is lightyears away in my measures. So I’ve dedicated two days, today and tomorrow, as First Real Days of Summer Vacation, where I’m not stressed out about work, school or travels, just relax'uhn.

I’m probably just going to be bored, though.

no title

2007-06-28T04:18:03+02:00

Best Mac vs PC video EVAR.

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2007-06-27T07:17:27+02:00

Marble machine 1 in action (via Matthiaswandel)

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2007-06-27T07:09:57+02:00

Marble adding machine (via Matthiaswandel)

I'm Sure It Makes Sense To the Creator

2007-06-26T22:57:26+02:00

Hm-mm-m! I was sampling mds this morning and came across:


247 -[SISearchCtx executeSearchContextCracked_2:jobNum:]

Cracked? Cracked, you say? Hm-mm…

Someone trying to scam my brother, failing miserably

2007-06-26T03:20:43+02:00

since im much too lazy to blog about actual

2007-06-23T20:28:14+02:00

Since I’m much too lazy to blog about actual experiences, you’ll have to read Amanda’s account for what I’ve been up to the past three weeks if that sort of things interests you.

public thoughts: End the Safari crashes

2007-06-23T18:38:04+02:00

public thoughts: End the Safari crashes

If your Windows Safari 3 installation crashes often, here’s the solution. For Swedish users, the folder names are ‘sv.lproj’ and 'Swedish.lproj’. Update: Easier solution.

from penny arcade yes this is how it feels to

2007-06-22T02:48:30+02:00

(from Penny Arcade. Yes, this is how it feels to play on Live Arcade.)

My Girl is a Lucky Girl

2007-06-20T05:41:58+02:00

Voy! I just returned from Dreamhack Summer ‘07. While the event was fun, the awesomest thing is that my girlfriend won an XBox 360! I guess I’ll be a giddy Microsoft fanboy a while on.

Blog'd!

2007-06-20T05:32:58+02:00

I left a comment on a Gizmodo post about Transformers nerds wondering about why nerds always deprecate themselves and are ashamed of other nerds. Jason Tocci over at Geek Studies.org found the comment interesting enough to blog about it!

I’ve been fascinated with this kind of self-taboo within geek/nerd cultures since I started studying Game Programming at Blekinge Institute of Technology. No one here is openly nerdy unless you know them well. If someone finds himself discussing intricacies of C++ syntax while on the bus, he’ll quickly switch subject to the weekend’s party when he realizes what he’s talking about. Even though me and my friends here have lots of common interests, conversations may die out entirely because we have nothing /non-nerdy/ to talk about – it’s as if it’s unsocial and ‘boring’ to talk about nerd stuff. The really weird thing is that I do it myself too!

I’ll be following Geek Studies. Perhaps Jason will unravel the mystery of the Geek Shame.

no title

2007-06-17T21:26:16+02:00

Interesting Argument About Global Warming - Watch more free videos

What’s the worst thing that can happen?

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2007-06-16T18:32:44+02:00

Is Your PC Feeling a Little Bloated? (via gizmodo.com)

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2007-06-16T08:16:50+02:00

glumbert.com - Japanese Tetris

Japanese “tetris”. Awesome!

Rockness

2007-06-07T05:16:18+02:00

Rockness

I’m leaving for Scotland in a few hours. See you in a week!

Email is such a funny thing. People hand you these single little messages that are no heavier than a river pebble. But it doesn’t take long until you have acquired a pile of pebbles that’s taller than you and heavier than you could ever hope to move, even if you wanted to do it over a few dozen trips. But for the person who took the time to hand you their pebble, it seems outrageous that you can’t handle that one tiny thing. “What ‘pile’? It’s just a fucking pebble!”

2007-06-05T20:06:24+02:00

Email is such a funny thing. People hand you these single little messages that are no heavier than a river pebble. But it doesn’t take long until you have acquired a pile of pebbles that’s taller than you and heavier than you could ever hope to move, even if you wanted to do it over a few dozen trips. But for the person who took the time to hand you their pebble, it seems outrageous that you can’t handle that one tiny thing. “What ‘pile’? It’s just a fucking pebble!”

—Merlin Mann on the strange allure (and false hope) of email bankruptcy

no title

2007-06-04T21:51:53+02:00

I just realized I hadn’t liked to this yet. Everyone should see this. This is truly the future of computing.

No, the problem is that programming is really fucking hard; and if you look at those people who are acknowledged as the best programers, they’re generally the ones who acknowledge that […]

2007-06-02T08:54:38+02:00

No, the problem is that programming is really fucking hard; and if you look at those people who are acknowledged as the best programers, they’re generally the ones who acknowledge that […]

—gwenhwyfaer in a comment to The Great Pyramid of Agile at Worse Than Failure, in response to the statement that “The problem with our industry, as I see it, is that anyone can program.”

no title

2007-06-01T21:12:23+02:00

I’m on national TV! ;)

The disk "Foo" is in use and could not be ejected.

2007-05-29T19:07:07+02:00

Solution (because just ‘lsof’ doesn’t work):


sudo lsof +D /Volumes/Foo

Tadaaa! Creds to Russell Edwards in a comment to an e-scribe blog post.

no title

2007-05-26T10:08:41+02:00

Tagging HOUSES with a laser projector. Via the project.ioni.st.

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2007-05-25T08:27:21+02:00

Hello future.

The Theoretical Game

2007-05-22T06:58:38+02:00

The Theoretical Game

I present unto thee: my latest creation. And my first Java cell phone game.

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2007-05-21T07:50:13+02:00

CuteFTP sucks badly.

2007-05-18T21:35:51+02:00

Don’t download it. In particular, don’t pay for it. My client paid $40 to them for it just to get some proper support from them, and even then, all they said was “It’s a fault in the configuration of the server you’re connecting to. Ask the server’s administrator to fix it.”, when the “fault” was that my server uses Unicode instead of ISO-Latin-1 for file name encodings.

no title

2007-05-18T04:39:40+02:00

Wobbly Worm: The motion the icons in your Mac OS X Dock will make when you, after a reboot, launch all your common apps by clicking on them in order, making them do their “I’m launching” dance in a wave.

(My Wobbly Worm is: iTunes, Safari, Mail, Adium, iCal, Colloquy and XCode.)

Despite the complete absurdity of the design request, […] the job will go to a candidate who manages to answer the question by designing an extremely overcomplicated solution for a completely non-existent problem. And that candidate will be the same person who designs their software.

2007-05-17T21:29:54+02:00

Despite the complete absurdity of the design request, […] the job will go to a candidate who manages to answer the question by designing an extremely overcomplicated solution for a completely non-existent problem. And that candidate will be the same person who designs their software.

—Worse Than Failure on Microsoft’s job interview practice.

I’m not sure how long it takes to twist your brain into a state where teenagers having cancer seems preferable to teenagers having sex, but I can’t imagine it’s easy. You really have to struggle to be that stupid.

2007-05-16T00:35:15+02:00

I’m not sure how long it takes to twist your brain into a state where teenagers having cancer seems preferable to teenagers having sex, but I can’t imagine it’s easy. You really have to struggle to be that stupid.

—Why Right Wing Crazies Love Cervical Cancer | Glass Maze

no title

2007-05-15T20:51:02+02:00

In case you’ve been trying to reach me lately: I’m writing code until 8 am mostly every day now. The Big Project has a Last Day Of Code this Sunday, and we’re faaaaar from being done. Meanwhile, three of my clients are bugging me for important updates and bug fixes.

See you when things slow down.

Very strange double-free in SUI102::dealloc

2007-05-15T10:42:59+02:00

In two completely different apps, one Carbon and one Cocoa, at some point, the system seems to want to wander off into some obscure part of the system and initialize the camera system. In the Carbon app, it’s in the standard event polling loop for no apparent reason. In the Cocoa app, it’s when I’m showing an open-file panel, for no apparent reason. I’ll show you snippets of the call trace in the Cocoa app:

#46 0x00002236 in -[SlideshowView initWithFrame:]

Okay, so that’s expected.

#45 0x9346ce20 in -[NSSavePanel(NSSavePanelRuntime) runModalForDirectory:file:types:] ()

Yep, that’s what I’m asking for.

#44 0x93346fab in -[NSApplication runModalForWindow:] ()#39 0x92dd6fe2 in ReceiveNextEventCommon ()
#43 0x933481d4 in -[NSApplication _realDoModalLoop:peek:] ()
#42 0x9327d056 in -[NSApplication nextEventMatchingMask:untilDate:inMode:dequeue:] ()
#41 0x9327d465 in _DPSNextEvent ()
#40 0x92dd6e39 in BlockUntilNextEventMatchingListInMode ()

Okay, fine, you want to poll for events. That’s okay, I said ‘show it modally’.

#33 0x92e5eebd in ActivateTSMDocument ()
#29 0x92e612af in InitKeybdMenu ()
#28 0x92ff33da in EstablishSelectedInputMethodsOfClassesIn ()
#27 0x9083db30 in CFArrayApplyFunction ()
#26 0x92ff43f4 in EstablishSelectedInputMethodsOfClass ()
#25 0x908259cb in CFDictionaryApplyFunction ()
#24 0x92ff344e in EstablishSelectedInputMethodsScriptIterator ()
#23 0x9083db30 in CFArrayApplyFunction ()
#22 0x92ff6524 in EstablishSelectedInputMethodsComponentIterator ()
#21 0x92ff1d4d in SetTextServiceSelected ()
#20 0x92ff1ac4 in SetTextServiceSelectedCore ()
#19 0x92e65915 in ConvertToComponentID ()
#18 0x90cbc56e in FindNextComponent ()
#17 0x90cbc5da in FindNextComponentInternal ()
#16 0x90cbc994 in registerSystemComponents ()
#15 0x90cbf971 in processSerialKissers ()
#14 0x90cfddfb in kissComponent ()
#13 0x90cd3389 in CallComponentRegister ()
#12 0x90cce7f8 in CallComponentDispatch ()
#11 0x90cce8cc in CallComponent ()
#10 0x0af38caf in sgpnMainEntry ()
#9  0x90cceb13 in CallComponentFunctionCommon ()
#8  0x0af38d08 in sgpnRegister ()

Yeah okay, you’re doing some magic to populate some UI or something, instantiating some dynamically linked code component. Fine, I can buy that too. I’m sure there’s a lot of that going on behind my back.

#7  0x0af34fdf in CameraCentral::startupWithNotificationsOnMainThread ()

Or uh… What, what?! CameraCentral? What the hell does the camera have to do with anything?

#6  0x0af34c6d in CameraCentral::registerCameraDriver ()
#5  0x0aef7d6d in SUI102::~SUI102 ()
#4  0x0aef7c7e in SUI102::dealloc ()
#3  0x90005d0f in free ()
#2  0x9010eb32 in abort ()

Oh *SMOOTH*. Not only are you for some absurd reason loading camera drivers, you happened to load a camera driver that does a *double free* in its destructor (You create a driver and then immediately destroy it, too? Ohhh, cruel.). It must be my birthday.

UPDATE

Apparently, Sonix SN9C201 WebCam.component is utter shite. Don’t install it. Thanks to jonmarimba, mikeash and rudy over at #macdev on freenode for the help :)

Mac frameworks for common game libraries - GLEW

2007-05-14T23:03:00+02:00

Mac frameworks for common game libraries - GLEW

I’ve added GLEW to my list of Frameworkified game libraries.

FreeImage is now Frameworkified.

2007-05-03T09:02:00+02:00

I’ve updated my Mac frameworks for common game libraries page with instructions and binaries for the FreeImage library.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

2007-05-02T17:28:39+02:00

Wow. Next-gen DVD DRM is so dead.

no title

2007-04-28T08:16:44+02:00

MEDC 2007 Worst Practices. Microsoft presentations seem so fun :P (via objective-d.com)

no title

2007-04-20T23:23:55+02:00

Richard Stallman Free software Song. Must be seen to be believed.

hanging tough via pk images

2007-04-20T05:50:35+02:00

Hanging Tough (via pk-Images)

IPv6: Turning our salvation into a mouthful of disappointment

2007-04-19T03:46:43+02:00

Unholy mother of uninformed panic, this is so bafflingly idiotic. End-to-end NAT-less communication is the very *dream* that I hoped that IPv6 would bring, but now this single feature is deemed a *security issue* and recommended to be blocked? ACK!

The genius at Homeland Security who started this oughta be banned from ever using a computer again. He/she obviously takes way too much pleasure in making using a computer a pain.

Um, maybe they think about computer science as programming because it is programming? Without programming, how exactly are computer scientists going to revolutionize anything at all? It’s like saying that people are discouraged from becoming surgeons because they think of it as “cutting people open”.

2007-04-18T08:36:31+02:00

Um, maybe they think about computer science as programming because it is programming? Without programming, how exactly are computer scientists going to revolutionize anything at all? It’s like saying that people are discouraged from becoming surgeons because they think of it as “cutting people open”.

—John Gruber’s commentary on a NYT article on women in CS.

How to merge mp3:s

2007-04-09T09:20:51+02:00

Use MediaRage ( http://www.chaoticsoftware.com/ProductPages/MediaRage.html ) to organize all the mp3’s in one big pile in a folder. Make sure that when sorted by name, the mp3’s are in playing order (for example, they would be so if they were called “disk 01 track 01 first track.mp3”, then “disk 01 track 02 second track.mp3”, and so on.)
Download mpg123 from Forked.net
Unpack and install
Open Applications > Utilities > Terminal.app
Write ‘cd ’ (without the ’) in the newly opened terminal window
Find the folder with the mp3’s, and drag it to the terminal window, and press enter.
Type:
/usr/local/bin/mpg123 -w allt.wav *.mp3
and press enter
Wait. You should be seeing “Decoding of (filnamn) finished.” once for every mp3 in the folder
When it’s done, put the wav file in iTunes. If the result is an audio book, take step 10 and 12. Otherwise, you can skip them.
In Preferences > Advanced > Importing, choose AAC encoding, press OK
Right or ctrl click on the wav file in iTunes and select “Convert selection to AAC”
When it’s done, get info on the aac file, and make sure that it’s bookmarked.

On burning students to a crisp

2007-04-05T09:37:36+02:00

When I was studying at highschool, they gave us larger and larger amounts of homework and projects and responsibilities to take care of. They motivated this practice by saying that it was a good thing – it would teach me how to prioritize and plan, to prepare me for university life.

All it did was make me miserable, because as little as you can make a coffee maker be better at making coffee faster by pouring more and more water and coffee powder into it, human beings don’t automagically become efficient planners and non-procrastinators because you pour larger and larger amounts of responsibility on top of them.

Almost everyone I know feel very bad under the stress of the large heaps of responsibility put on them. Not a single student knows how to relax without intoxicating themselves to the verge of senselessness. (Which derails my thoughts as usual: the Student Health and lots of ‘grown-up organizations’ tell us over and over again that we should drink sensibly (read: less), that it’s bad, blah blah blah. They never seem interested in finding out why people drink so much, what the actual root cause is, and how to fix the problem instead of the symptom. Am I right or wrong? Personally I have no idea, since I don’t drink, but I’m imagining that one would drink in order to rid oneself of all this stress).

In essence, we’ve all been put under more and more weight under the assumption that something magical will happen, and we’ll one day learn how to plan and prioritize, boom, just like that. In practice, some do, but most just learn to be very good procrastinators and escapists in order to cope. Okay, I’ll just get to my point already: If you’re trying to teach us to plan, why not make planning a freakin’ part of the curriculum, goddamnit?! We’ve had a dozen courses in 'studying techniques’ (how to read large amounts, how to take efficient notes, how to make presentations, etc…), but nothing on coping with a large amount of tasks. I say, make Getting Things Done or something like it mandatory reading the moment highschool pupils step in the door.

Links for 2007-03

2007-04-03T19:38:11+02:00

I wanted to do a weekly linked list, but I’m too lazy to organize the links that delicious has already spammed my blog with, so I’ll just bunch them together here, and make linkblog entries once-per-week in the future instead.

Palms Out Sounds - Where’d Daft Punk get all those samples from? If you like Daft Punk, you’ve gotta check these out.
Mac OS X Python Packages for Universal Python 2.4 on Mac OS X 10.3.9 and later (Intel and PPC) - Precompiled python packages for mac.
PythonGameLibraries - PythonInfo Wiki
A List Apart: Articles: Sliding Doors of CSS - A classic
swfIR: swf Image Replacement - Do neat image stuff client-side
NINE INCH NAILS . YEAR ZERO - Songs from NIN’s latest album
echoing the sound :: a nine inch nails discussion forum :: View topic - Current Summary of Year Zero Info – READ THE FIRST POST - All the info you’ll ever need about NIN’s ARG
Das blog von Todd Ditchendorf » Blog Archive » Expandable Widget Tutorial - Resizable Dashboard Widgets
cloudmakers.org - ARG community
Adobe edits the development cycle | Reg Developer - How do you even begin when you’re to develop such a big product?
Payment Processing with Paypal and Ruby - Book on the subject. Might be useful some day.
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger (Part 12) - Spotlight eats CPU sometimes. It’s a bug in mds. Look her on how to fix it.
Sending email in Java: There’s more than one way - Builder UK - haha, more than one way to do something in Java? NO WAY!
CoolStuff.se - like thinkgeek but Swedish
SoundManager 2: Javascript Sound for the Web
Creating web sites for the Wii Opera browser
.:: m3rLinEz ::. Another tech blog: UTF-8 in Netbeans 5.5
Canon Powershot TX-1 Hands-On: 720p in the Palm of Your Hand - Gizmodo - mmm, HD video camera!
taw’s blog: The right to criticize programming languages - Good and bad things about a few languages
BlueShoes browser-based Wysiwyg Editor (dhtml, javascript)
Rich Text Editing With Dojo
Ben’s Incredible Big List of Initialisms and Acronyms (BIBLIA)
Davidville - The blog of the guy who makes Twitter
Web Typography Sucks | Slides and notes from SxSW 2007 - It sure does, and here’s how to fix it.
LaFonera Router // HACKINIG // BingoBommel: Hacking the La Fonera - PART II
Beast - “A small, light-weight forum in Rails with a scary name and a goal of around 500 lines of code when we’re done.”
twittermap - Twitter/google maps mashup
Main Page - AwkwardTV - Hacking the AppleTV
MaxConsole Forums - 3.0X OE Guide - Hacking the PSP
~ 3.03 OE Custom Firmware Installation Guide (Ver. 3.03 OE-C) ~ - PSP™ General - PlayStation.com Forums - Hacking the PSP
~ Custom PSP Firmware Installation Guide (Ver. 3.10 OE-A+) ~ - PSP™ General - PlayStation.com Forums - Hacking the PSP… Yes, I like hacking my PSP ;)
Seashore - About - Very promising MSPaint replacement for the Mac
The Committee for Technological Obfuscation | Glass Maze - This describes Java so good!
About Keyboards(IM: Tx) - Mac keyboard keycodes. Good when writing input managers for games…
Musicovery : interactive webRadio - Like a Pandora and former-AudioGalaxy mashup

Apple’s sustainable competitive advantage is their deep trust in the inherent value of their products and the experiences they provide. Almost no one has that these days.

2007-04-03T19:19:16+02:00

Apple’s sustainable competitive advantage is their deep trust in the inherent value of their products and the experiences they provide. Almost no one has that these days.

—David Weiss (MacBU) with wise words. Everyone is trying to artificially lock their customers to their products (either by proprietary formats or FUD) instead of believing that their product is actually better than the competition and that that will retain their customers.

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment: Day 8 OF DOOM

2007-03-31T20:48:16+02:00

And then I failed. Of course I failed. For some STUPID reason I put my phone+alarm clock ULTIMATE COMBO on the bedside table. When I woke up at 7am after my nice little 3hr core sleep, I clicked “Turn off alarm” and thought with a very very small part of my brain (which I like to call ’the stupid brain’), “Hey! I’m pretty tired! Let’s lie down!”.

It’s now 11.47 am. I just woke up.

On the end of Day 8, I made a vlog for this entry as well.

Feature request: Consolidate link posts

2007-03-30T17:28:23+02:00

You know, the way Mark does it. Takes my delicious feed’s entries and posts a single consolidated post at the end of the day.

Oh, and it’d be nice if, when the delicious feed contains no description for a particular entry, it didn’t output broken html.

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment: Day 7

2007-03-30T17:25:24+02:00

It’s impossible. There’s just no way I can get myself to get up after my three hour core nap. I *always* oversleep by an hour. Which means that I’m tired but not inhumanly tired. Which means that my body has no incentive to do radical changes to my REM sleep. Which means I’ll never learn to nap. Which means I’ll never be able to master polyphasic sleep.

I don’t get it. Other polyphase-sleepers must’ve been able to withstand the urge to sleep an extra hour, but how? It’s not like I’m so full of rational thought when I’m that tired – I just go back to bed and use whatever failing logic I can come up with to convince my conscious brain that sleeping is okay, like “Oh, but I’m just going to lie down! I’m not going to fall asleep! Haha, you know I shouldn’t do that. No, I’ll just lie down a litte.”, and then I fall asleep.

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2007-03-30T17:20:33+02:00

Uh. Why does it seem like tumblr’s just picking random delicious bookmarks that I marked ages ago and throws them in together with my new ‘uns……?

It really does look messy with the blog consisting of just all my recent bookmarks. They’re all interesting and worth a read if you’re into the link’s subject, though. (And who’s not into PSP homebrew? :) )

Polyphasic Sleep Experiment: Day 4

2007-03-27T23:57:50+02:00

My wonderful girlfriend recently blogged about our experiment with polyphasic sleep, the Everyman pattern to be precise. According to Puredoxyk, Everyman’s supposed to just “be tricky for a day or two”, while Uberman can be hella hard.

Well, either I’m doing it wrong or Everyman’s fuck hell much harder for those who are not übermensch like puredoxyk. At times I’m so tired I’m almost crying, and staying up that last hour between 3 and 4 am is pure hell, I tell you.

Comments on a tumblr blog.

2007-03-21T04:48:06+01:00

Here’s a semi-ugly hack to get comments on your blog.

Go to your settings and change to a custom theme.

Right before:


</div>
{/block:Posts}

…Paste the following.


<div class="cmt">
  <a href="http://nevyn.nu/cmt/?id=YOURBLOGNAME.{ PERMALINK }">
  (cmt)</a>
</div>

…So that the result looks like this:


  <div class="cmt">
    <a href="http://nevyn.nu/cmt/?id=YOURBLOGNAME.{ PERMALINK }">
    (cmt)</a>
  </div>
</div>
{/block:Posts}

Change YOURBLOGNAME into the name of your blog, and remove the spaces before and after the word PERMALINK! It’s a bug in tumblr which prevents me from typing it correctly in my blog post.
There’s no step four! ;) Well, you might want to define the css class cmt so that it doesn’t look super-ugly… I defined it as:
```
            .cmt {
	            font-size:        10px;
	            text-align: right;
	        }
```
but it’s still pretty ugly…

The application you’re now using is an old php hack of mine. It supports nested conversations and all that jazz, but no feedback on your blog whether there’s comments on the post, nor email notifications or even moderation. But it’s better than nothing.

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2007-03-20T07:15:46+01:00

Eighties isometric perspective schoolbook illustration graphics music video doing a visual commentary on the modern western society, all set to Röyksopp’s enchanting melodies. Beautiful.

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2007-03-19T23:21:49+01:00

Tillman. The other skateboarding bulldog. Awesome.

Further anecdotes from Java Hate Land

2007-03-19T08:29:00+01:00

Style is a class that inherits from MutableAttributeSet which conforms to AttributeSet. An AttributeSet contains key-value pairs describing character attributes, which works okay. However, Style contains additional state about character attributes that is seemingly completely separate from the state held by its superclass. Using the interface from AttributeSet to set character attributes yields no result whatsoever – the resulting text is unstyled.


	Style s = new Style();
	s.addAttribute(TextAttribute.UNDERLINE, TextAttribute.UNDERLINE_ON);
	// Rendering text using s yields plain text, no formatting.

To actually set the style of a Style, you use the class StyleConstants’s static methods set[type of attribute](MutableAttributeSet, newValue), like so:


	Style s = new Style();
	StyleConstants.setUnderline(s, true);

Recall that AttributedString does not inherit from String. I’m beginning to believe that the Java designers never realized what object orientation is and just add inheritance to classes where it sounds good.

There seems to be no way whatsoever to represent styled text in Java that is in any way portable across the Java API. AttributedString only works with printing; AttributedCharacterIterator is the only way to get text and style out of the AttributedString; Style is used by the UI to represent style but while it actually inherits from the same class as the internal style representation in AttributedCharacterIterator, it’s actually completely incompatible. I’ve seen even more ways to represent style, but haven’t used them so I can’t recall them at the moment.

Right now, I’m going through hell to be able to get a formatted text representation of a model class of mine, being able to either append it to a JTextPane or send it directly to the printer, and later being able to extract the styled text from the JTextPane and send it to the printer. The text is going through at least three different representations of style on the way.

Please, for the love of god, tell me that I’m missing something blatantly obvious that makes this make any sense whatsoever.

IDEA: Meta-tags for feed consolidation.

2007-03-18T08:31:34+01:00

Keeping a list of all my feeds by deliciousing them with the tag meta:feed. Then you can use that feed as a feed-feed for your feed reader. Metafeeds. Mmmmm. The idea is so good because it’s so nerdy!

Ooh. And tagging with meta:feed:group:[:[:]] to sort the feeds. And meta:feed:tag: to tag a feed. Meta-meta-meta-info. We’re really on to something here!

Can't stop playing. 165 yards; you?

2007-03-18T07:55:22+01:00

Can't stop playing. 165 yards; you?

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2007-03-18T07:20:53+01:00

Rahzel - All I know. Awesome, it was years and years since I saw this one. Youtube rocks.

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2007-03-18T07:08:28+01:00

Nouvelle Star. Absolutely awesome beatboxing. (via video.feber) (another angle. YouTube needs Babelfish for audio! ;) )

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2007-03-16T19:45:42+01:00

I’m tooo tiiireeeeed.

Must think about candidate thesis. Can’t think. Problem.

I hate the Java API. Truly. With all my heart.

2007-03-14T22:13:00+01:00

A JTextPane that shows styled text can’t take an AttributedString. You can’t get the string out of an AttributedString without iterating through it, because it doesn’t inherit from String. You can insert attributed text into a JTextPane, but only by giving it a String and an AttributeSet. You can’t get an AttributeSet out of an AttributedString, but you can get a map out of it. Which are two completely different things, it seems.

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2007-03-12T07:57:16+01:00

Thom Yorke - Cymbal Rush - Henry Rollins Show (via yorkerollins)

Thom Yorke is completely awesome. Seeing him perform is beyond words. Good thing I haven’t seem him live, I’d probably asplode.

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2007-03-11T22:11:22+01:00

In the breathtaking Scottish Highlands, on the shores of Loch Ness […] The Chemical Brothers […] Daft Punk

2007-03-08T08:02:56+01:00

In the breathtaking Scottish Highlands,
on the shores of Loch Ness
[…]
The Chemical Brothers […] Daft Punk

—Rockness promises aural riches beyond comprehension. Before the day was over, I had two tickets.

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2007-03-08T03:39:00+01:00

SHE IS SAYING PROCRASTINATION IS A GOOD THING