I came across this video today. It is a fantastic explanation of how the current economic crisis began in layman’s terms. The graphics are stunningly well done…I can’t recommend it enough, so just go watch it.
via →Pretty hilarious, you can tell someone was having a bad day:
“fucking imap fucking sucks. what the FUCK kind of committee of dunces designed this shit.
imap talks about ‘unique ids’ for messages, to be used for cross-session identification. great–just what sup needs! except it turns out the uids can be invalidated every time the ‘uidvalidity’ value changes on the server, and ‘uidvalidity’ can change without restriction. it can change any time you log in. it can change EVERY time you log in. of course the imap spec “strongly recommends” that it never change, but there’s nothing to stop people from just setting it to the current timestamp, and in fact that’s exactly what the one imap server i have at my disposal does. thus the so-called uids are absolutely useless and imap provides no cross-session way of uniquely identifying a message. but thanks for the “strong recommendation”, guys!”
via →I’m not sure why, but the Cocoa development community doesn’t seem to be into unit testing. Or perhaps, I’m misreading the community and it’s mainly Apple that doesn’t push unit testing hard enough.
It wasn’t until recently that Xcode even had unit test support, sure, you could use 3rd party frameworks, but it wasn’t built in. It’s unacceptable for testing not to be a high priority, and I’m not sure why Apple waited so long to bake it in. Even now you have to jump through hoops to get the debugger working with unit tests. From my personal experience as an intern at Apple, both teams I was on did not make significant use of automated tests while developing. Sure, there were QA teams, but unit tests weren’t present. Apple just doesn’t get unit testing (thankfully there are a few on the inside who are test infected, like Chris Hanson, who as a member of the Xcode team is probably responsibly for the unit test support in Xcode).
Xcode now has support for unit tests, and Apple did put out a guide on unit testing. So the situation is getting better, but not ideal. In comparison, the Java community really gets testing, and has a whole host of useful tools (Java does have many other problems, but at least testing isn’t one of them). Tools like test coverage analyzers and mock object frameworks. These tools should be included with Xcode by default.
Maybe the next version of the dev tools will include OCMock, and GUI support for GConv. Or has the situation gotten better and I haven’t noticed?
Postbox is an interesting new e-mail app put together by former members of the Mozilla Thunderbird team. Its built on the Mozilla code base, but unfortunately, it feels like a heavily skinned version of Thunderbird. I tried to like it, but the UI is cluttered and not Cocoa (it’s a cross platform app, and it shows).
They do have some slick features however, some of which I’ve been planning for Kiwi and independently came up with. I won’t say what though…
I’m not sure how these guys plan on making money, they’ve mentioned something about “harnessing the power of connections between social networks and email,” or some BS like that…not particularly compelling. Either way, I wish them luck.
via →Welcome to my refreshed blog!
I hadn’t noticed until recently that I haven’t updated since 2007, yikes. But, its back and here to stay. I’ve moved my VPS to Linode which is cheaper and much more powerful then my previous one. Along with the switch to the new VPS, I’ve changed from Wordpress to a custom Django application originally called CX which was developed by Jesper Noehr, one of the guys behind BitBucket. Since I don’t like PHP, I really like Python, and my previous Wordpress install was hacked; I decided to move to CX and hack it up. The code is quite nice, so it was easy to make modifications. I added support for Atom feeds, source code highlighting, and layout changes. The layout is a bit rough, but it works for now.
If you’re interested in my changes, you can take a look at the fork of CX I created CXR
I’ve made almost every one of these mistakes while working on personal projects (spanning a long time period). But hey, that’s how you learn.
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