🏷️ programming

To answer @jenks' question, yes I'm downloading the iPhone SDK and I'll be trying to start writing iPhone applications. It would really help if I actually had an iPhone, but with a baby on the way, I've really been trying to justify it.

I'm not a very well-paid programmer, as I make less than a buffalo elementary school teacher, and once the little one comes into the world, I might as well have my employer do a direct deposit to my landlord, daycare, univera, whatever infant daycare provider I manage to find, and the bank that does my car payments; after those get taken out, we're eating and buying baby clothes off of @inscrutable's paycheck, which is about half of mine. I'm not going to complain, because people in some other area of the world would kill for 1/100 of what I have, but the situation has me scared shitless.

I probably will end up getting an iPhone, because I can justify it with trying to earn extra money for my family by developing and selling iPhone apps by whatever mechanism Apple sets up. I'm also studying Google's Android phone development environment, so I can enter something into their contest, which has some pretty lucrative prizes. There's so much crap I have to cram into my head to make money on the side, but the more I can cram into my head better off things will be for us.

Screenshot of estrip on a simulated Google phone

I have discovered one of the deep, dark, ancient secrets of my predecessors at work: how they generated bar codes.

This occasion calls for a beer. Too bad my throat's sore and I can't eat/drink anything.

(Warning, non-english computer rant below. I need to express my overwhelming anger somewhere).

Still no Apple-provided Obj(google-guard)ective-C way of doing regular expressions. After 5 major OS versions and 7 years! Motherfuckers!

Every other language framework has them, except for Cocoa. Every single damn one. Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP, Java, JavaScript, .Net/C#, Gtk, Qt. Hell, even WxWindows has a regular expression class. WxWindows for crying out loud! But still, nothing from Apple.

Having needed regexps many times when doing mac development over the years (as so many people just aren't nice enough to make their content into web services), the lack of this important functionality in the core library has been an enormous source of wall-punching ire for me. As is the protestation from hardcore NeXTies that 3rd party laissez-faire solutions are good enough, or that the API is just too damned 'selective' to have regexps, or that scripting languages should really be used instead. The last one is really confusing; as they've added automatic garbage collection, it seems like they're trying to make Ob(google-guard)jective-C competitive with scripting languages that provide regular expressions.

The emperor looks even more naked from the standpoint of an Ob(google-guard)jective-C developer when one looks at all the other stuff that's either missing an API altogether or has a C-based non-OO API (did I mention that Apple keeps telling us that "Cocoa is the future"). There's no Apple-provided OO Cocoa interface for web services, none for getting the basic system configuration, nothing for WebDAV, nothing for secure FTP, nothing for any sort of MD5/SHA-1 checksum, nothing for relational databases. It's stuff that so simple to add, or at least should be from the standpoint of a billion-dollar company, yet it doesn't get added. Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

I know that the world faces more pressing problems, and there could be happier thoughts running through my head than constantly thinking about giving Apple the finger by creating a framework called "CoreFunctionality" that intentionally clashes with Apple's namespace by including such classes as NSRegularExpression and NSHash.

Hell, I just think I need to rant so I can form my battle plan with a clear head and ponder on where to get stuff for my slutty costume I'm wearing tomorrow.

There's a reason why I've spent the last few days with a murderous glare in my eye and thoughts of getting all Voldemort on a few Open Source programmers (and the rest of the software industry for good measure while I'm at it). I've tried and tried to get a piece of software at work functioning, and it's absolutely fucking ridiculous. I'll pretty much leave it at that and defer to a guy who has already adequately described the general source of my ire.



I guess I should also try to find the humor in the situation (from )

"We believe that good documentaiton is probably the single most important thing for a successful project..."

If someone hasn't yet created voodoo dolls you can buy that represent programmers whose code you inherit, then someone really should. I bet they would be a best seller.

No, I haven't had a difficult day at work. Why would anyone think that?

Apparently they're having another BarCamp in Rochester this year. I didn't make it last year for whatever stupid reason I can't remember so I really want to go this year. One of the things I really miss about Triangle is all the techie user groups and conferences and it would be nice to get a quick fix.

It's a shame, though, that Buffalo can't have these kinds of things. It would be nice to save some gas money instead of driving to Rochester.

When I finish my long "stop estrip from crashing on Safari" journey, I'll probably write a long post about it with all the stupid details. But for the time being, I'll probably use this journal to keep track of how far long I am.

Step 1 Summary

Yesterday, I fired up my powerbook in a fresh reboot and ran only Safari with e-strip loaded on it without having visited any prior sites. I left the machine to sit there idly the entire day I was at work. When I came home and turned on the monitor, I see a crash dialog.

From this experiment, I can most likely conclude that there's nothing special I have to do, such as being in the middle of a post or writing a comment, for Safari to crash on (e:strip). And this is great, which means that there's a lot less slightly different iterations of things I'm going to have to test to get the crashes to happen.

Step 2 will being fashioning a simple, estrip only web browser with webkit, the underpinnings of Safari, and that browser to estrip and leaving it and seeing if it crashes. If it doesn't crash, then that likely means there's some problem with the Safari executable itself and the webkit libraries it uses are okay, although I think that is pretty unlikely.

- First off, an addendum. Yesterday was easter, and as I didn't have anything better to do (insert Chinese restaurant joke here) I took advantage of the lull in traffic at the Elmwood & Marion intersection to snap a few photos for my project. Like the madman that I am, I rushed out into the middle of the street between traffic light changes and tried to get the best shots I could while not being run over. However, I didn't refer to the original photograph for reference like I should have, so after all my hard work and risk-taking, the distance was still all wrong and the overlay won't work. The small piece of Marion in the original isn't in the target. I really should use the stitching feature of my digital camera on the next pass.

Original:



Target:



- For some reason, Safari has been crashing on estrip for months. I think it has to do with a new userpic appearing when someone new logs in. At some point, I really should set up a packet sniffer or something and check it out further.

- BEGIN BORING PROGRAMMING PARAGRAPH (skip if bored by programming stuff)

Yesterday, I decided attempted to learn Ruby on Rails. After spending several hours trying to learn the stuff, I decided to pretty much give the technology a write-off, as I was about ready to throw my computer and the book I just bought clean out the window. A while ago, I started writing my own blogging application based on XML that I could have eventually rolled into a full-fledged MVC web application environment. I am seriously kicking myself now for having not finished it. I am so dissatisfied with everything out there. You know, come to think of it, I'll probably continue trying to learn Ruby, just so I'll know what's going on if I ever see any example code for anything general that uses it, and just because I'm so freakin' thorough and don't like to leave unfinished what I've started. I'm just a masochist like that.

END BORING PROGRAMMING PARAGRAPH

- I've also started looking at houses a little bit more. I'm really not sure whether I want to buy one, as I've considered moving back home to North Carolina near my family someday, or possibly moving somewhere else to a different job. But I keep thinking that I'm sinking 8k a year into rent that I could be putting into equity.

I really like the whole "Elmwood Village" area, and I'd like to stay within walking distance to Spot. I'd actually like a house on Richmond, but aside from being kinda pricey for someone in my income bracket, they would cost a bitch to heat (no insulation and high ceilings) and every house on the street is so huge because it's designed for tenants to live in the upper half. I really don't want to be a landlord or have large heating bills, and unfortunately most of the houses in the Elmwood-Richmond band (for lack of better terminology) require you to endure both if you own them.

So far, the best fit for me seems to be the northern buffalo/kenmore area, which is actually where I was driving around this weekend looking at the houses for sale. That area seems to have a decent number of homes that are small enough to keep sanely heated/cleaned by one person and would keep my mortgage somewhere near to what I'm currently paying for rent.

Another day or so, and I can eat regular bread again instead of matzoh. At least according to my religion. According to my triglycerides and my doctor, regular bread will always be chametz.

I finally bit the bullet and paid a substantial sum of money to join the elite club of A D C (A pple D eveloper C onnection), because if I want to get a machine in the near future, I can either choose to get the hardware discount that official developers get (which is offset by the exhorbitent membership that costs exactly the same amount as the developer hardware discount) or pay full price and get no membership at all. With membership, I get access to interesting stuff that I can't legally talk about but may prove useful in the future. In a sane world, work would pay for this membership and pay to send me to W W D C. Oh well, c'est la vie.

Yeah, it's kinda stupid I don't have anything better or more eventful to write about and resort to talking about geeky stuff. But I'm working towards the "100+" lettering on my userpic.