Six Word Stories: Sleeping

Sleeping late seemed the best revenge.

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Greed

There’s an interesting line in this Slate article, discussing the Austin kamikaze:

Sure, it may look like greed to keep 100 percent of your paycheck, but Stack was doing it all for us!

This little remark is in the service of a larger, possibly valid, point, but I want to focus on the small-scale question of greed.

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Full-Text Search (Page)

I pulled together all my Full-Text Search articles into a single page. And lest you think that I’m just padding out the blog with recycled content, let me add that I fixed a bug in the demo project. (It used to include a reference to an Icon.png file that I had removed.)

And here’s a Dinosaur Comic that I find particularly amusing.

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Six Word Stories: Girlfriend

Robert’s girlfriend quickly searched his phone.

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File System Access

I don’t know how to access the filesystem on my iPhone from my desktop. I can write apps that talk to their sandboxed parts of the filesystem just fine, but I don’t know how to reach into arbitrary parts of the iPhone’s filesystem from my desktop and move files around. This can be inconvenient when developing and testing code. I have developed a workaround, however, which I’d like to talk about.

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Roger Ebert

Ok, Ebert. I enjoy a lot of Roger Ebert’s writing. I don’t always agree with his take on film, and don’t much care for his politics, but I think he’s a pretty good writer. And far be it from me to take a “stick to movies, you erstwhile ball of lard” line; the dude has every right to write about whatever strikes his fancy. Nevertheless, if he’s going to write about politics, I think he needs to start giving his political opponents a bit more respect if he doesn’t want to look like a complete jerk.

Consider this bit, from his “St. John of Las Vegas” review:

The script, we learn, was written by the director Hue Rhodes, based on the epic poem by Dante Alighieri. That name might not ring a bell with a lot of moviegoers and had better not be a question on the Tea Baggers’ literacy test. We all recall that Dante’s Inferno told the story of a journey into hell, with the poet Virgil as the tour guide.

This passage says absolutely nothing good about Roger Ebert.

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Six Word Stories: Doors

Drowsy tigers lolled behind both doors.

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Full Text Search (Demo)

I’ve been talking about Full-Text Search (FTS) for a while; today I just want to present a working demo. Here is a complete Xcode project that will build a simple “Notes” style app with integrated FTS. Performance is pretty acceptable; the only sore spot seems to be index construction, which tops out around 3000 characters per second on the device (iPhone 3G).

The code is BSD-licensed. Enjoy!

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Valentine

Trivia:

  • Almost nothing is known of the St. Valentine commemorated on 14 February.
  • Cesare Borgia was also known as Duke Valentine.
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Six Word Stories: Burglar

Cats regarded the burglar with disinterest.

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