NSLog();

Question: Guess how long I stared at this before I found the problem? How long did it take you?

My Answer:

for($j=0; $j<count($dealers); $j++);
{
    if($dealers[$j]['state'] == $state)
        $dealers_in_state[] = $dealers[$j];
}

The answer (highlight to read): [Took me about 20 minutes. For some reason I had it stuck in my head that $dealers wasn't being loaded correctly because it was from a file I had include('d') in the main file.]

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

I used AJAX today. This tutorial helped.

I cheated, though. My data is fetched from a PHP script. I didn't want to create and return valid XML because parsing is such a PITA, so my PHP script just returns a big ol' HTML string. Then I use the request's responseText instead of parsing the responseXML.

Hee hee. 😉

A pal of mine has set up a site for former or ex-Apple employees (it depends on how you look at it) at afterapple.com. I have yet to sign up as all of my Apple associates are either friends that still work for Apple, former co-workers I don't care to talk to, or former co-workers I really don't care to talk to, if you know what I mean.

Tomorrow, Carey and I are going to do something we should have done awhile back: get set up with the Millcreek teacher's credit union. We'll have her checks direct deposited in there and essentially attempt to pretend that we're a single-income family (mine).

Then, if we build the game room, we'll have a credit union to use for the equity loan and they can direct deduct from that account. We'll probably catch a good break on that. I'd like to have the game room built this winter - I've got projects lined up that will more than cover it (if my guesses re: the cost are accurate - see below). I always work harder when I've got something "to pay for," and the prime rate keeps going up and up and up, and building costs have risen something like 33% the past few years. We'll see…

This entry has some pictures of the area above the garage, some diagrams and schematics I've drawn, and so forth. It's mostly for my own use, but if you know about construction, by all means have a peek.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 1224); »

Dammit. You'd think I'd learn. Saft and Security Updates don't go well together. Duh!!!

Here's to hoping this SAFT update doesn't quite take 12 hours as the last one did. Here's also to hoping that I have a tiny bit more patience when the next security update is released.

Question: How good are you at building physical creations?

My Answer: Eh. Give me Legos and I'm pretty good. Not so much with other things of medium or complex difficulty.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

I still cannot purchase anything from the iTunes Music Store. I continue to get the same error message. I have to go to Tam O'Shanter today to meet with the pro down there for some work I'm doing for a golf company and was interested in buying an audio book.

I submitted a support request four days ago and have yet to hear back.

One of the things that's always bugged me most about common forms of Christianity is the whole concept of forgiveness. It bugs me that I can attempt to lead a good life, do so, and yet find myself in the company of a mass murderer who somehow "finds God" on Death Row and repents or asks for forgiveness just before they juice him up. Or, if I should commit some small sin before I die (stealing isn't hard, for example - if you split a drink at McDonald's you're technically guilty of stealing) and then die in a car wreck, well, some might say I'm hell-bound because I wasn't absolved of my sins.

Penn Jillette says it well:

Believing there's no God means I can't really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That's good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.

I remain someone who believes that there's something greater than us, a collection of cells, out there. But then again I believe there's intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. I've always said that I cannot and will not believe in a "God" that would punish me for trying to find the truth, and I carry on a bit of that truth-seeking conversation every day of my life.

From Apple:

The installer increases the default values for the size of the TCP send and receive buffers. With larger buffers more data can be in transit at once. A startup configuration file is also updated so that these changes will persist across restarts.

I haven't checked speeds before and after, but I'm surprised the installer doesn't demand a restart. 😛

Die, Bill Cowher, die. Take the majority of the rest of the coaching staff with you.

I'm not sure why I ever thought that I could participate in Mario Kartfest 2K5 - the Steelers play Monday Night Football tonight. Duh!

Sorry. I'll catch the next one, though.

Jon Evans asked me in this post on "the 'feed://' protocol" what browsers were misunderstanding the "feed:/" prefix. It turns out none of them are: the feed protocol seems to be misunderstood by feed readers written in Java.

Every attempt (and there were a few hundred since I disabled the RedirectMatch) to access http://nslog.com/feed://nslog.com/comments.rss or http://nslog.com/feed://nslog.com/index.rss came from either a browser with an of either Java/1.5.0_04 or Java/1.4.1_04.

Incidentally, search engines still enjoyed visiting my old category archives (at /archives/cat_name.php), so a new RedirectMatch has made it into my .htaccess file:

RedirectMatch /archives/cat_(.*).php http://nslog.com/$1/

Question: Look back over the previous 9 to X QotDs: have I missed anything lost in the 9 to X transition?

My Answer: I know of a few, but they border on being small things, like "the purely spatial Finder." Still, if you can think of something, I'll put up similar "9 to X" questions and see what people think.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.

Carey and I are (eventually) considering adding a game room over our garage. The house was built to do just this.

When I get an idea in my head, I tend to run with it. I obsess a little bit and do a lot of research, typically online. I prefer forums because I can ask questions or, most of the time, simply read the backlogs to get the knowledge I need. I like other informative sites as well, or even newsgroups and the like, but each has their minuses and plusses.

A quick Google search turned up a few interesting sites. I'll list them here. If I'm missing of any and you know of some, by all means, add a comment and pass on the URL. I appreciate it.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 852); »

Question: Do you miss Mac OS 9's "popup folders"? Have you done anything to get them back?

My Answer: I missed them originally because I often kept some commonly-used folders down there. Since customizing the Finder's sidebar, I don't miss them anymore… and I can have more than one of them open at once.

You are encouraged to answer the Question of the Day for yourself in the comments or on your blog.