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Posted on December 13, 2009 by MXH

Comment sections are a ripoff. If you want to go to the trouble of writing something worth reading, it doesn’t seem like a good deal to post it as a comment. It might be gratifying in the short run, but I believe that it’s a bad long-term investment.

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NSFetchedResultsController pitfall

Posted on December 11, 2009 by MXH

I’ve previously written about how neat I find Core Data’s NSFetchedResultController (NSFRC). Today, however, I must offer (another) word of warning. The documentation states that, if you set an NSFRC’s delegate:

[T]he controller registers to receive change notifications from its managed object context. Any change in the context that affects the result set or section information is processed and the results are updated accordingly.

I’m not going to come right out and say that this is a dirty, stinking lie, but I will say that my experience suggests that, in some circumstances, the NSFRC behavior described in the documentation is at variance with reality. Fortunately, there are workarounds.

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Tiger

Posted on December 10, 2009 by MXH

Two branding questions for you:

  • If Mac OS X 10.4 “Tiger” was AAPL’s current OS, would the Tiger Woods frenzy have caused AAPL’s marketing dept. any problems?
  • Why wasn’t Porsche’s 911 brand damaged by 9/11?

I don’t know the answers, I’m just posing the questions.

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Pearl Harbor Day

Posted on December 7, 2009 by MXH

I was recently reading Matthew Modine’s “Full Metal Jacket Diary“, and came across this quote:

I’m so happy that Cari and I have been invited to travel here [East Berlin] and have the opportunity to meet communist soldiers. Except for the uniforms and the language, they are just like the soldiers in my family.

We share cigarettes and the soldiers give us pins from their uniforms. Interesting, communists seem to have the same desires as we do. To live peacefully and provide for our families. Duh.

Growing up in Utah, I’d been taught that the Russians were horrible monsters, “Better dead than Red.” “The evil empire.” All propaganda …

This strikes me as wrong-headed in two important respects.

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Banner Removal

Posted on December 6, 2009 by MXH

A reader writes:

When I print out your puzzle (I like to do paper and pencil rather than keyboard) the top portion of the puzzle is obscured by your banner ad–not much use!

I don’t have the time to test out media-specific CSS solutions to this problem right now, so I’ve just removed the banner.

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Date Helper

Posted on December 4, 2009 by MXH

As a followup to my earlier post on a “helper” view controller that handled the editing of long text fields, today I present a utility class that handles the editing of date fields. I hope you find it interesting.

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Stacks

Posted on December 3, 2009 by MXH

A quick anecdote about technology. I’ve been visiting Stacks for lunch, on and off, for 13 years. Around the time of the dot-com boom/bust (c. 2000), I noticed that the waiters and waitresses had been issued PDAs, which they used to record orders. Today they’re back to pens and notepads. Go figure.

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Viva Honduras

Posted on November 30, 2009 by MXH

Sometimes, the good guys win. Today, simply because this election was held, it looks like Honduran democrats won, and the Chavez proxies lost. Good deal.

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Natural Language Mathematics

Posted on November 29, 2009 by MXH

I recently saw this story on Slashdot about “Revolution 4.0“, which claims to make programmers more productive by providing an “easy English-like language” in which to write code. This sort of thing strikes me as profoundly wrong-headed, and I’d like to present an analogy to try to explain why.

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New Sections

Posted on November 27, 2009 by MXH

A quick warning about the insertSections:withRowAnimation: method of UITableView. If you insert a section with this function inside a beginUpdates/endUpdates block, you should not insert rows into that section (with insertRowsAtIndexPaths:withRowAnimation:) inside the same begin/end block. Somewhat confusingly, the first row insertion appears to work correctly, but subsequent ones tend to crash the program. Caveat insertor.

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