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News Announcements
Downtime on Friday
The Zathras.de server (and my associated servers, i.e. the Masters of the Void tutorial) will probably be down for an hour or so on Friday for maintenance work at the provider. There's no need to worry, we plan to come back :-)
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ValueConverter 1.2
I just released version 1.2 of my little programmer's tool for converting between various data types, ValueConverter.
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CocoaHeads Muenchen diese Woche
Diese Woche ist wieder CocoaHeads München, am Donnerstag, 8.10.2009 um 20:00 im Park Café.
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Look and Feel Podcast launched
You may have noticed that it's been so nice and quiet. (...)
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UKSound and UKSystemSound
Hi folks,
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Programming
Playing with Objective C on Debian
I felt like playing with Linux a bit, so I went and installed Debian on a partition. Apart from a few failed attempts to install it on an external drive (something which works fine with MacOS X, so I was spoiled) and a bit of confusion when it asked me for my drive name (how would I know a cryptic character combination like hdb4? And I selected that drive in your UI before, can't you let me use that same selector again?), it went pretty smooth. (...)
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Uli's 12:07 AM Law
If your Objective-C++ code keeps crashing with an
invalid instruction exception
Your mental diarrhea made you forget to declare a method that takes C++ object by value. Since undeclared methods get a signature of -(id)methodName: ... and you can't pass a C++ object through such a variadic argument list, you get what you deserve.
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Uli's 1:24 AM Law
If your custom accessibility objects don't get outlined on the screen by VoiceOver, chances are you nit passed a really small rect as the accessibility position/size for the containing accessibility object, and the sub views' outline is gone after it's been clipped to the superview sizes.
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Uli's 6:28 AM Law
Get the _NSWarnForDrawingImageWithNoCurrentContext error message on your custom image rep? Don't pass a zero height to NSDrawBitmap(), you cognitive bluescreen!
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Uli's 3:57 PM Law
If your XML doesn't parse due to a
closing tag not found
error, you mental bancruptcy have unquoted attributes on an opening tag. And yes, you're a moron for not quoting it, even if it is a number.
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Usability
Hacking the Press - A point for usability in press kits
I once saw Adam Engst, of TidBITS fame, hold a talk called "Hacking the Press" at the Advanced Developers' Hands-on Conference (the first successor to MacHack). It was a great introduction to how the press works, told with the average programmer in mind, translating the life of a journalist into words we geeks can understand. I don't remember much of it in concrete details, but whenever the topic of press releases comes up, I realize that I know much more about this stuff than by all means I should, so I guess Adam managed to insinuate himself into my brain quite well.
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Double click is a shortcut
John Gruber mentioned in passing that people are confused about when to double-click and when not to. It's true, but that doesn't just apply to users. I've seen many application developers not knowing (or simply not caring) about when to use a double-click, and when not to.
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The Sinus Curve of Life
Certain events in life happen in circles. I think I got this piece of wisdom from my dad, back when I was a kid, and I keep seeing how true it is. The two examples I remember him giving me on different occasions were the recommended way of brushing your teeth and the progression from single-purpose power tools to integrated ones and back.
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Look and Feel Podcast launched
You may have noticed that it's been so nice and quiet. (...)
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Why I don't want to be Delicious - Beyond the Unboxing Experience
Ages ago, most blogs I read were abuzz with talk about "the delicious generation". There was talk about "writing your own fucking HIG", about "steak versus sizzle", and many other beautiful and colourful phrases summarizing why and what the "Delicious" group of applications was (supposed to be).
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Reviews
Review: G. I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
G. I. Joe was a toy line from Hasbro with associated animated series in the 80ies that is virtually unknown here in Germany. The toys and a few movies were briefly released under the toy line's international name "Action Force" here, in Switzerland and a few other countries, but never really caught on. I used to watch it on an English cable channel as a kid. (...)
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The Screaming Narwhal has Launched
![[Screenshot from Tales of Monkey Island, Part 1: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal]](files/tales_of_monkey_island_narwhal.jpg)
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Great movies and TV shows
I just read a top ten list of movies and realized I hadn't done reviews in a while. Two of the TV shows I reviewed last time have been canceled in the meantime: Blood Ties and Moonlight. While Moonlight got criticized by me for its derivative and pretentious nature, it was derivative of the right shows, and got an order for four more episodes after the strike, so I'd thought it might stay and at least give us a base level of vampire TV shows for the time being.
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Blood Ties, EFC and other TV fare
Since my last proper review blog posting, I've seen a bunch of stuff, so I thought I'd give you a short rundown. I just don't have enough time to write proper reviews of each and every one of them.
Blood Ties
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Fun Stuff
Mixed-language ambiguity
The German verb "backen" means "to bake". Which of the two companies below, do you think, sells things for your back, and which one for baking?
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Very funny, Apple...
Very funny, Apple:
(gdb) po anInvocation
Some day, NSInvocation will have a useful debug description
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Adding dates to the RSS feeds
Some newsreaders and aggregators out there apparently can't cope with feeds that contain no dates. Since the feeds on zathras.de fall under that heading, I've finally bit the bullet and changed my site to be more in line with their expectations. While I was at it, I also changed the RSS feeds to be full-text feeds instead of the short summaries they were before.
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How Mac OS X saves disk names...
Okay, so to reproduce a bug, I had to replace Helvetica with another font. My friend Flo grabbed a font with a name of the same length and just did a search-and-replace, and I dropped that in ~/Library/Fonts and I started testing.
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My Photoshop ate Opera!
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Laws of Programming
Uli's 12:07 AM Law
If your Objective-C++ code keeps crashing with an
invalid instruction exception
Your mental diarrhea made you forget to declare a method that takes C++ object by value. Since undeclared methods get a signature of -(id)methodName: ... and you can't pass a C++ object through such a variadic argument list, you get what you deserve.
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Uli's 1:24 AM Law
If your custom accessibility objects don't get outlined on the screen by VoiceOver, chances are you nit passed a really small rect as the accessibility position/size for the containing accessibility object, and the sub views' outline is gone after it's been clipped to the superview sizes.
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Uli's 6:28 AM Law
Get the _NSWarnForDrawingImageWithNoCurrentContext error message on your custom image rep? Don't pass a zero height to NSDrawBitmap(), you cognitive bluescreen!
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Uli's 3:57 PM Law
If your XML doesn't parse due to a
closing tag not found
error, you mental bancruptcy have unquoted attributes on an opening tag. And yes, you're a moron for not quoting it, even if it is a number.
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Uli's 4:41 PM Law
Leave the variable names in your prototypes, don't delete them because you think it looks cool. They serve as documentation.
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