NSLog();

Question: Is "masturbate" a dirty word?

My Answer: Fucking cunt no. It's perfectly legitimate. By the way, yes, this post and the one previous are meant to make a point. As soon as I figure out what that point may be I'll let you know. 🙂

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

While discussing the difference between "people" and "the software they write" (right along with the shitty dialogue in Star Wars and creepy fans):

me: I wonder how many customers Adobe would lose if they found out that John Warnock liked to sing yankee doodle dandy while masturbating in the morning?
me: probably 0 from any European countries
pal: yep.
pal: <0
me: this country has a stick up its ass
pal: way up
me: while at the same time hating anyone who might enjoy having a stick up their ass 🙂
me: hmm, that's a fun quote
pal: blog it!

So, anyone who might enjoy having a stick up their ass, please feel free to do so on my account. Enjoy.

Joel Spolsky has posted another "Microsoft is Stupid" missive at joelonsoftware.com. Many of his points are valid, and his main point is rather lucid, but one paragraph stood out for me as a Mac user and developer.

The toss-aside paragraph comes in a section in which Joel talks about Microsoft's engineering efforts in getting old applications working on new OSes. Joel tells the story of SimCity, which relied on a hack to quickly do some things, and which broke on a newer version of Windows. Microsoft added code to Windows that preserved the old "broken" way of doing things when SimCity was active. Joel holds this up as "A Good Thing™" before launching into this:

A lot of developers and engineers don't agree with this way of working. If the application did something bad, or relied on some undocumented behavior, they think, it should just break when the OS gets upgraded. The developers of the Macintosh OS at Apple have always been in this camp. It's why so few applications from the early days of the Macintosh still work.

Funny, but I remember seeing screenshots of MacPaint, MacWrite, etc. running in Classic mode when Mac OS X (Public Beta or 10.0) was released. Here's a screenshot of SuperPaint from 1993 running on Mac OS X 10.2.8. Classic mode was hailed as a pretty great way to bring even the oldest of applications along (thanks Will Scherrer).

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 774); »

As I write this, .Mac's email service has been out for over five hours. Lovely.

From the Cocoa-Dev mailing list. Can you help?

I'm writing an app that uses NSURLConnection for getting some files (using the delegate callbacks), and sometimes, that connection just sits there and does nothing, even though the timeout should have killed it a while ago (the server is working properly). I tried to create a workaround by using an NSTimer that kicks in right after the timeout should have killed the connection, sends the -cancel message to the connection if it's still there without having received any data and quits the thread. That works fine in the UI, since I can tell when it has timed out (which is bad anyways, since it shouldn't time out when the server is working properly).

However, the NSURLConnection is not released (even though the thread itself has already terminated and the retain/releases are properly balanced), and the file descriptor is kept open. Fetching is occurring periodically, so after a while the per-process limit of open file descriptors is reached (256 I think), and the process quits silently (since NSAlert can't even put up an alert box, since the nib-file can't be loaded).

Has anybody an idea how to fix that problem? (I'm particularly interested in solutions for the initial problem, not the one that's caused by the workaround)

I've seen this one first-hand and haven't found the solution yet. Anyone got any info? I'll give prizes to those who help. 🙂

Question: If you were going to have a morning talk radio show, what would you call it?

My Answer: My radio named would be "Charlie Wood" and I'd call my show "Morning Wood" or "Wake up with Wood." Of course, I'd have to prepare for a month so as not to laugh every time I said it myself. 🙂

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

Microsoft Exec #1: We've got a steaming pile of shit for an OS in which thousands of holes are found each month!?! What to do?
Microsoft Exec #2: Let's sell our own anti-virus software, profiting from our ineptitude!

I heard a few years ago that about 1/3 of all Windows software did one of three things: uninstalled software, repaired the software/OS, or tried to protect against viruses and spyware. I'd bet that percentage is no lower than 25 today.

John is doing something daring indeed with Daring Fireball: asking for you to support his efforts. Even though I was given a key awhile ago (I purposely changed some details and flipped them around so as not to give any hints away), today I bought the t-shirt. The color grey, it's just so hot! 🙂

I hope that enough of you cough up a few bucks and join. John writes well, and has a mind to match. It'd be a pity to lose his voice from among the few capable of his level of entertainment, insight, humor, and tact.

Giles Turnbull says some nice things about PulpFiction in a little ditty calledRSS: The Next Generation:

At $25^*, this is a good-value application that offers many new features for RSS. Treating feeds like email makes a lot of sense, especially for newcomers to the concept.

Giles talks about how he doesn't save articles very frequently, and I'll admit that I don't either: I flag and keep articles I want to keep and I keep all articles from certain blogs, leaving them in their subfolder. Otherwise, I skip through my articles by pressing the delete key (or the mapped button my wireless mouse when I feel like sitting way back in my chair). I choose to delete articles older than one week: long enough for me to find a recent article that springs back to mind, but not so long as to cruft up my trash.

PulpFiction 1.0.1 is in very active development with over fifty bug fixes and improvements under its belt already. It will be available by the end of the month.

^* Users capable of scrolling down or flipping back a few entries on this blog will only have to pay $20. 🙂

Is this irony or just complete stupidity?

I'm willing to listen, up to a point, but unless your site is hosted on weblogs.com, I don't understand why you're hogging the microphone right now.

The ironic part being, of course, that Dave took the microphone away from people whose site was hosted on weblogs.com. The only people left are those without weblogs.com microphones (and a few of his friends).

There was an uproar when iTools morphed into .Mac, and it didn't involve anything nearly as serious as immediately shutting down all services without warning.

Today I implemented a download survey on FSS. While a user waits for their download, they can answer three or four questions. Users who completely fill out the survey get a one-time coupon for 20% off an order of $15 or more - a way to say thank you and, to be completely honest, to encourage impulse buys. On the whole, the information we collect will be helpful in shaping our site and products. The questions are rather generic for now, but I imagine they will change over time.

Question: If you were forbidden from using the word "love" and its close synonyms (amour, "really like", etc.) to describe that feeling, which word would you choose?

My Answer: Cherish comes close. Comfort. I think I'm actually going to go with appreciation, and not in the way you appreciate a nice steak or a piece of artwork, but in the way you appreciate everything that a person is, does, can be, says, thinks, feels, etc. Appreciation breeds respect and so many of the other things that feed into a good relationship. Of course, I may change my mind or think of a better word in five minutes, but right here and now: appreciation.

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

Question: Is stealing always stealing?

My Answer: No, and it's one of the blurrier lines a software developer, designer, and author probably have to walk. PulpFiction works a lot like Mail, and we borrowed some of the UI, but we didn't steal it: we implemented all of our own features and wrote all of our own code using freely available tools and our own wee little brains. I've heard that good artists copy, great artists steal, and to some extent that's correct: theft is perhaps only theft when the original owner has been deprived of something.

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

Two quick announcements today. First, Freshly Squeezed Software now has an RSS feed. I'm editing it by hand for now because I'm unaware of a straight old RSS-creation app. Subscribe to it and stay up to date with FSS news.

Second, FTPeel 1.1.4 is now available. A free upgrade of course, version 1.1.4 fixes a number of smaller issues and enhances the FTP-SSL functionality with some servers (and a few other things). It also fixes one of the most annoying bugs involving typing to select. Check the extended entry or the version history for more details.

I've currently got four two one gmail invitations and any friend that wants one has one, so the first four people to purchase FTPeel today and to write to me or IM me will receive a gmail invitation. Limit 4, naturally, and first come, first served.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 509); »

Are you good with Cocoa, Networking, and AppleScript? We may have a position available for you within FSS. Details to follow, but those who are interested may IM ("iacas") or email (IM if you could eh?). We may be looking for about 20-40 hours/month, primarily of development time but occasionally answering support emails about one of our products in particular.

That's all I know for now. I'll know more in a week and towards the end of the month. Interested (potential) candidates may want to show off their communication skills by publishing an article at Cocoa Dev Central.