Author: Andrew Huey

iMac


iMac
Originally uploaded by andyhuey

When I agreed to develop a Mac app for a client, I’m not sure why I agreed to make it backward-compatible to OS 10.4. Now I’m stuck testing my app on this crazy thing.

The weird thing about Cocoa development is that there are perfectly innocuous things that work fine on 10.6, but don’t work at all on 10.4. And that don’t throw errors either, so it’s pretty hard to nail them down.

Netgear ReadyShare

I bought a new router back in July, a Netgear WNDR3700-100NAS. It has a USB port that can be used to share a USB hard drive on the local network. I’d been meaning to use that, but just never got around to hooking a drive up. Well, I finally started playing around with it last week, using a 1TB MyBook drive that has been sitting in a box on my floor since November 2009 (long story). I didn’t quite manage to get it working then. (Another long story.)

I tried again today. I didn’t get it working at first, so I tried to upgrade the firmware on the router, thinking that would help. I couldn’t manage to get that done, at first, but I hit upon the brilliant idea of power cycling the router, and that allowed me to finally download and install the new firmware. (“Have you tried turning it off and on again?“)

With the new firmware, I had much more luck. The router recognized the drive, I could browse to it on my desktop PC, and I even managed to connect to it from my MacBook.

I think I’m done with this for the night, but I’m hoping to try backing up my MacBook to it at some point, maybe next weekend. I really need to start doing backups again.

Charlie Chaplin

I was flipping through channels this morning, and landed on TCM right as the final scene in The Great Dictator was starting. That final speech is great:

We think too much, and feel too little.
More than cleverness, we need kindness.

And so on. I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t think I’ve ever seen this whole film, all the way through. I’ll have to see if it’s coming up again on TCM and set up my DVR to record it. Either way, that final speech is worth watching and re-watching.

After I originally posted this, a friend pointed me a Roger Ebert article on this film. It provides some necessary context for this movie, both in terms of Chaplin’s career, and the larger historical context. He mentions that the film “comes to a dead end” with this final speech, and that it “deflates the comedy and ends the picture as a lecture.” True enough, I guess, but I kind of like it.

Little Dog Lost

OK, I know it’s sappy, but I like it.

Also, in the “dubious achievements” department, I have finally caught up and read all of the comic strip e-mails that have been piling up in my GMail account. I subscribe to GoComics.com, and get a daily e-mail with about a dozen strips. I fell behind in reading them quite a while ago and never caught up. Until this weekend, when I inexplicably had an urge to read about six months worth of comic strips. (One of the things that helped me catch up is that the older e-mails largely consisted of broken image links, since they apparently don’t keep the image links functioning forever. Except for those on Garfield and Doonesbury, for some reason.)

Kindle 3

I’ve been catching up on some reading today, working my way through some old e-mail newsletters that have been piling up in my inbox. I’m in August 2010 right now, so I just hit David Pogue’s Kindle 3 review from the NY Times. I’m using my Kindle 3 about as often as I was using my Kindle 1. I’m in the middle of a “dead tree” book right now, but when I finish that, I’ll probably go back to the Kindle, and pick one of the many unread books I have on there to read next.

And here’s a Times article from Sept 2010 about e-readers vs dead tree books: Of Two Minds About Books. Somewhat interesting.

I’ve also just started messing around with Instapaper. I bought the iPhone/iPad app, but I think the best way to use Instapaper is to use the feature that sends your unread articles to the Kindle. That works well, but it’s frustrating that, unlike the iOS app, you can’t interact with your account in any way. You can’t mark articles as read, for instance.

I’ve been thinking about writing up a long blog entry on the way in which I’m currently consuming news, and Instapaper is part of that. I’m still organizing my thoughts on that, though, and I’m not yet sure if I have anything to say that’s interesting enough to write up.

Cocoa project

The Cocoa/Mac project that I’ve been working on is pretty much done. It’s not a really big or complicated program, but I just ran a ‘wc’ on it, and it’s a bit over 1400 lines of code, so it’s not trivial either. I’m betting that, if I was more experienced with Cocoa, it could probably be, maybe, 900 lines instead of 1400, but that’s still a reasonable size. Oh, and if I didn’t have to support OS X 10.4, and could have used the garbage collector and other stuff that only works in 10.5+, I could probably have shaved off another 100 lines of code.

My program is replacing an old program written in FutureBASIC. Looking back at the source code for that, it was a bit over 600 lines of code, all in one file. You can definitely write a shorter program if you don’t have to declare variables, or allocate and release memory for them.

Overall, I had some fun learning a new language and a new framework, and figuring out how to solve problems that would have been trivial for me to solve in .Net/C#. I’d like to learn some more Cocoa stuff now, and maybe try writing an iOS app. I don’t really have a specific idea for an app, but I’ll figure something out.

StackOverflow

StackOverflow has been very useful for me lately, both at work (with the usual .Net stuff) and at home (as I try to figure out Cocoa programming). I asked them to merge my work and home accounts today, so I’d have just one account. I hit a 100 reputation score recently on my work account, and I don’t want to risk losing it, if I change jobs, or the company goes bankrupt or something. So here’s my StackOverflow flair:

profile for AndyH at Stack Overflow, Q&A for professional and enthusiast programmers