Concrete

I just started reading Concrete: The Human Dilemma. I’ve had this mini-series sitting in my reading pile since it was published back in 2004/2005. I’m really enjoying it, and I wish I had more Concrete to read, but I just checked Wikipedia, and apparently there hasn’t been any Concrete published since then. Oh well.
Paul Chadwick does a great job of mixing large-scale social commentary with small-scale human moments. And his artwork is great too. He obviously puts a lot of thought into panel arrangement and “camera angle” within the panels, and sometimes uses little tricks (for lack of a better word) that could only work in comics. Bits that, in the wrong context, would be distracting, but work well for him.

EasyHttp

I haven’t had much reason, until recently, to start messing around with .NET 4 and C# 4. But I just had to do a bunch of stuff involving REST and JSON, and I found that the new dynamic type was very helpful there. Specifically, I used EasyHttp (available on GitHub), which makes it very easy to consume RESTful web services, and (via JsonFx) serialize and de-serialize JSON.

I know that there are other ways to do all this stuff, but I think EasyHttp and JsonFx work well and are easy to use. With dynamic objects, I don’t have to worry about mapping a JSON result to an explicit .NET class; I can just access those members I need to access and ignore the rest.

PHP tip of the day

If you’re running an array through json_encode(), and part of that array is a reference to another array, do _not_ json_encode() *that* array first. JSON-encoding something that’s already JSON results in… confusion. This is one of those things that I would have figured out a lot faster if I had any kind of debugging set up for PHP. Maybe I should look at FirePHP. I don’t do a lot of PHP work, but I’m using PHP right now to test some REST web services that I’m writing in .Net/C#. (Debugging the .Net code, of course, is a piece of cake.)

kicking and screaming

OK, I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into 2011. I finally upgraded my home desktop machine to Firefox 4 and IE 9. (The work machine, of course, has had both installed for quite a while.)
I didn’t want to upgrade either until I was sure at least one of them would work with LogMeIn. It does seem to work OK in both Firefox 4 and IE 9 now, so there’s no reason for me to not upgrade now.
On a related issue, I was testing HTML 5 video in IE 9 last week, and ran into a really annoying problem.  For some crazy reason, my work machine has Windows 7 N on it, the version without Media Player. Well, it turns out that IE 9 won’t play HTML 5 video if Media Player isn’t installed. And it won’t show you a useful error message either.  It just won’t play. I eventually figured this out, and installed the Media Feature Pack for Windows 7 N. Now, all is well.

many things

Lots of things going on right now, and I just feel like I should dump them all into a blog post. This isn’t necessarily going to be an interesting or useful post for anyone but me, but I feel like I need to write it.

  • My brother Mike is in the hospital with pneumonia.  I haven’t been able to talk to him yet, so I’m not sure how bad it is.  (I’m in NJ and he’s in GA, and I haven’t been able to reach him on the phone.)
  • My brother Pat’s widow, who remarried a couple of years ago, just had a baby girl.
  • I met with someone today to organize an estate sale, so I can finally empty out my parents’ old home.  It looks like we’ll be doing it in about a month, so I really need to finish sorting through everything down there and make some final decisions about what I want to keep and what I want to get rid of.
  • My allergies have been pretty bad over the last week or two.  I went to the doctor yesterday, because I was starting to worry that it might be more than just allergies, but there’s no sign that there’s anything else wrong with me.  So, now I’ve got a prescription for Nasonex, to go along with the over-the-counter Zyrtec that I’ve been taking.  Hopefully, the combination of the two will help me out.

The next few blog posts will be about computer programming or comic books, I hope.

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.