NSLog();

Brad, one of FSS's gifted developers I'm happy to call a team member, has been banned from accessing Slashdot. Brad is working on PulpFiction and Slashdot is one of our default feeds. Andy, another FSS team member, was banned late last year for three or four days.

Why was Brad banned? Did he post bad comments or something? No. He was banned for taking up too many resources. Yes: the site that results in poor sites "being slashdotted" blocks users.

Either your network or ip address has been banned from Slashdot due to script flooding that originated from your network or ip address - or this IP might have been used to post comments designed to break web browser rendering. Or you crawled us with a rude robot, especially one that doesn't understand RFCs very well. We have limited resources here and are fairly protective of them.

Ahhh, the irony!! Here's an image of Brad's current view of Slashdot.

Question: What do you think of the Sopranos so far this year?

My Answer: I thought the hour-long dream sequence two weeks ago was a filler - something I'm not sure I see much need for in a 13-episdode season. It took a few episodes to get into the swing of things, but last week's episode was one of the best with Adriana's murder. Big plot point, potentially.

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

Question: Do you care about hockey? Are you watching the Stanley Cup finals?

My Answer: Yes, yes. Game two was one of the best I've seen, and game three was a great contest. The NHL often has the best playoffs of any of the major sports, yet gets the least respect by far.

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

As I write this, the Pittsburgh Pirates have taken a doubleheader from Chicago to "leap" to 22-22. That's dead last in the NL Central, but it's a better record than thirteen other teams in both leagues and good enough to separate the Pirates from first by only 4 games. It could be an interesting year. Or, y'know, it might not be. Small market teams like Pittsburgh rarely have much of a chance - the 1990-1992 seasons I consider flukes (helped with a good mix of veterans and young stars like Jay Bell, Jeff King, Barry Bonds, Bobby Bonilla, Andy van Slyke, etc.).

I'm going to see the Bucs take on the Marlins July 7, and July 5 and 6 if Gabe can get some good tickets.

It's a shame when reasonably good people are afraid of heartbreak. I'm not its biggest fan, but I'd rather have my heart broken than go through life without knowing the highs and lows of love on a semi-regular basis.

Sometimes simply feeling is a good thing. It doesn't matter if what you're feeling is good or bad, just that you're feeling something. Feeling lets you know that you're alive, that you're more than a collection of chemicals bound loosely together with a bit of skin.

Hearbreak? I'd take that any day over the dull numbness that most people seem to prefer. I'd watch a movie that makes me cry than one that bores me. I'd rather listen to a song that gives me goosebumps than one that does nothing but make me want to hear the song after it.

Heartbreak? Without the lows, how can you appreciate the highs? Take risks. Live, for crying out loud.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 393); »

Localization: something that's both incredibly easy and incredibly frustrating.

Incredibly easy: wrap all UI-bound strings in NSLocalizedString(), provide a .strings file, and localize your NIBs
Incredibly frustrating: coordinating all of the incredibly easy steps above

I've yet to find a good software package to help with the localization project. Sure, there's Polyglot and PowerGlot. We've also got nibtool, strings, and genstrings.

PulpFiction has nearly 300 UI strings in code alone, not counting those in nibs (menus, buttons, etc.). We have about 20 NIBs. We've got a few hundred connections. I'd consider this an average number of strings for an application of its size.

I'd pay $500 for a tool that made this whole process simpler: extracting strings from my nibs, putting them in, coordinating localizations, scanning the code for additions or changes, and so on. The tool doesn't exist. PowerGlot has a few good points, but I don't do Carbon development and I don't want to pay $3000 for a worldwide license. You can "roll your own" solution with the various other tools out there… but it's just messy.

Until someone fills the niche, I guess we'll do the best we can with what we've got.

How many ways can Entourage 2004 find to annoy me?

Grrrrrr. In other words: how the fuck am I supposed to control the order of the items in the menu if renaming them doesn't solve it?

I bought MovableType today. I wasn't going to - not until 3.0 (minus the "D") at the very least - because the only blog I run is this one. One author, one blog, non-commercial. I purchased the software because, in the end, it cost me $12.48.

I'd previously contributed $50, which got me two "recently updated keys" and a $45 discount off of the $69.99 intro pricing. My 50% "beta tester discount" brough the total down even more. I had hoped that the 50% would be taken off of the $69.99, resulting in a free copy of the software, but their order page smartly moved the discount to the end. Drats! I was looking forward to the day Six Apart paid me $10 to buy their software. 🙂

Now I have a new Recently Updated key for less than the cost of a new CD.

A blogger who may identify himself in the comments if he wishes wrote to me concerning behavior he'd observed in PulpFiction. This gentleman is going to be adding a "summary" feed alongside his "full article" feed and was concerned with PulpFiction's handling of these two feeds. He subscribed to his (currently secret) summary feed and checked for new articles in PulpFiction. He was surprised when none appeared.

PulpFiction did not offer up new articles because there were no new articles. The GUID - globally unique identifier - matched articles that already existed in PulpFiction's database. The question then became whether this was "a good thing&tm;." Mark Pilgrim says of this (regarding Atom feeds):

If the same entry appears in two different feeds, it must have the same ID in both places. This is not an exception to the "globally unique" rule; it's an integral part of it. An entry's ID is the key for that entry across all time and space. If the same entry appears in two places, it must have the same ID in both places - otherwise it's not really the same entry.

This gentleman is worried that readers, upon seeing the new summary feed, will switch their subscription to this feed, hit "Get Articles," and be disappointed as he was when none appear. Though Mr. Pilgrim advises against this, I suggested an alternative: prepend "sum_" (or something like this) to all of the summary feed's GUIDs, which would result in, for example:

Full Article GUID:  1234@http://domain.com/
Summary GUID:      s1234@http://domain.com/

If this guy wishes to go this route, with separte GUIDs across feeds, "new" articles would appear in each feed. Readers subscribed to both feeds (not that this is common, but it may be with PulpFiction's storage, searching, and filtering capabilities) get both as well. The only people who lose are those that switch feeds and have to delete 15 old articles - assuming they want to delete the articles anyway.

Brent has a little to say as well. What's your take?

Howdy folks: quick note here. I'm going to delete my index.rdf and index.xml files. These are version 0.92 and 1.0 feeds. Instead, use these feeds:

feed://nslog.com/atom.xml
feed://nslog.com/index.rss
feed://nslog.com/comments.rss

I've posted this single entry to the now-restored index.rdf and index.xml files. I will be deleting them in the near future once again.

It's a good thing Apple is around to remind us of the differences between the physical and the virtual worlds in which we work, play, and live (Frameset link):

For example, the number of items a user puts in the Trash is not limited to the number of items a physical wastebasket could hold.

How many 1s and 0s can a real-world trash can hold? If I make my dock icons larger, can my trash can hold more data? Silly Apple. 🙂

P.S. I'm not really picking on them. I'm just being a sarcastic mutt. 😀

Question: When you email for tech support from a software company (such as FSS, MacRabbit, etc.), how long do you expect to wait for a reply (auto-replies do not count)?

My Answer: I expect to wait about 8 hours, but I do not begin to get upset for at least 48.

I recently wrote an AppleScript that runs daily on my machine to analyze the length of time between a customer inquiry and our response (we have no auto-responders), and compile the data per day, week, and month. The first month's numbers are in and our average response time was 62 minutes. This includes email that arrives while I'm asleep (thus: at least a seven-hour response time for some of them). I'm fairly pleased. If we can stay under four hours, heck, I think that puts us into a pretty lofty class.

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

The English plainly reads:

Wash with warm water
Use mild soap
Dry flat
Do not use bleach
Do not dry in the dryer
Do not iron

The French portion contains an extra section. Translated, it reads:

We are sorry that 
our President is an idiot
We did not vote for him.

Neither did I… This tag is on a laptop case, and the original story is at the PowerPage. There's more at the official site, which claims that the "president" is of the company, not the country.

Question: Are your disks partitioned? Why?

My Answer: Mine are not. Since moving to Mac OS X, I've seen absolutely no need to do so, and as a Mac Genius, I never advised people to do so either. It's easier, for example, to simply use an external disk as a scratch disk for video editing.

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

An article on Slate talks about how most celebrity playlists suck. After checking out a few, I agreed. I also recalled that Michael Stipe had a celebrity playlist.

Neither the standard search for "Michael Stipe" or "Michael Stipe Playlist" returned the playlist. I eventually had to navigate to the home page, find the "Celebrity Playlists" text link, and search through a few pages of results until I found it:
Michael Stipe's Playlist. Suppose some girl I know published an iMix of hip Christian music, and that I wanted to check it out but didn't have the link handy. How would I find the iMix? There's no "search by name" feature.

It seems to me that the iTunes Music Store interface still has a ways to go.