NSLog();

Question: Do you own a gun?

My Answer: You bet your booty. 🙂^*

^* In other words, people who know me or even read this blog know this already.

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

Said a Microsoft employee very recently regarding the Cringely article that has caused a small stir in the Mac community (re: the new iPod division and the possible, eventual demise of "the Mac"):

Maybe they'll sell an x86 version of Mac OS for a few years. Then, Microsoft will fall way behind on Longhorn and decide to scrap it. They'll shop around for other OS's for a few years and then buy Apple. Steve Jobs will become iCEO and the next Windows will be based on Mac OS X with a compatibility box for Win32 apps.

Said Jobs at one point in 1997:

So that's the plan: Screw the dealers, sell direct, pit Rhapsody against NT, build Intel boxes, contract out the cheap stuff, and throw away the rest of the company. It just might work with the right leadership and no flinching.

Uh huh. 😉

I watched Bowling for Columbine last night. I really have no idea what Michael Moore's point was: it seems to have been the most directionless documentary ever produced. I started off thinking "guns are bad" yet he goes to Canada, shows that they have a ton of guns and don't kill each other like we do, and loses that point. Then he starts to talk about racism, but never really finishes it.

Heck, the only point that was impressed upon me is that the NRA needs to get some competent PR minds working for them, and that Charlton Heston, as good an actor as he may be, is a horrible spokesperson who can't answer a simple question with a real answer. Moore asks the question "why don't other countries kill like we do" and never puts forth any sort of opinion on his own and never supports anyone else's theories: he just makes fun of a few and moves on.

"Bowling for Boredom" was the runner-up title to this entry. Zzzzzzzzzzz. The movie sucked.

Question: Who do you blame: guns or people?

My Answer: People. Duh.

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

A few people have written in and told us that PulpFiction sometimes quits on them without leaving the little crash log window with the "Submit to Apple" button (it'd be nice if developers could rewire that to send the crash log to them). In other words, the app goes poof, disappears from the screen, and that's that.

I'm not certain what could cause this - we'd like to try to track it down, but nobody has provided any real steps to cause this to happen - and I'm not certain what circumstances could cause the crash reporter to fail to pop up on the screen.

Does anyone have any ideas? I'm primarily looking for developers who have seen this problem and have useful information for tracking this down, not "me too" type repsonses.

Question: When will Mac OS X 10.4 be available?

My Answer: I'm going to guess March, 2005. And you know what? That's fine and dandy by me. I wasn't annoyed at all by the rapid upgrades, because we needed to get to 10.3 quickly, but now that we're here, let's enjoy the scenery, get settled in, and not have to support 172 new features as developers every 12 months. Ahhh, what's that noise? Yes, the collective sigh of small developers everywhere. 🙂 I love new features as a user, and I love using them as a developer… but sometimes too fast is just that: too fast. We'll have a good pace now that all of the pieces are in place.

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

Alexei enters the argument between C++ and Objective-C. Alexei puts himself firmly in the C++ camp, of all reasons, because of templates.

As pal and FSS partner Andy said to me just now, templates are a work-around for a problem that doesn't exist in Objective-C." Templates rarely work well: a function that can take a float is very difficult to write if it's also supposed to take a complex object, or a string, or whatever.

Objective-C has one main model for programming, objects. C++ has two.

One unified method or "way of doing things" is better than two. Why force a decision? Objective-C handles both cases within its "one main model," and it handles them well. Want a template-like example from Objective-C that doesn't require a break in methodology or a separate way of doing things?

- (id)description

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 457); »

So, gMail accounts are still widely coveted? I have one to give away. Who wants it? For what? Seriously, for what? Email me at it: erikjb is the username. You can figure out the rest.

I expect this to go over really well. 😛

From a link provided in the previous entry, I downloaded the "MPW" font and set Entourage to use it with my plain-text emails instead of ProFont, which was suddenly using ligatures, curly quotes/apostrophes, etc. Here's what I found:

If you look closely, the line appears to get fuzzy about 2/3 of the way across. I saw this in my normal emails and freaked out. I thought that my 23" Cinema display was going fuzzy in places. I moved the email across the screen to see if the text at the beginning of the line would get fuzzy in "the bad spot" and it remained sharp. I took a screnshot with the built-in screen capture and pasted it into a Photoshop document. Here's what I found:

Why Entourage blurs the fonts in the middle of a line I don't know. It does it with any characters - "mw" was chosen here for no particular reason other than that the characters have three vertical strokes. The same characters appear fine to the left, but are fuzzy in the middle of the email (they seem to sharpen up a bit near the 70- to 80-character range).

In other words, WTF is up with Entourage 2004? Ugh. I've switched back to ProFont, ligatures and curly quotes and apostrophes and all, because at least it doesn't go fuzzy on me.

My fonts are set to not smooth at 8pt and below. ProFont and MPW font are used at 9pt (so yes, they smooth in Entourage). I really haven't had any problem with Mac OS X's font smoothing in any of my applications.

Question: Do you have a "best friend"?

My Answer: Ignoring the obvious nature that one person is probably always the "best" friend on some scale or another, and going with the old-school meaning, I'd have to say that I don't. Instead, I employ a distributed best friend, sharing different parts of my life with Kati, or Carey, or Crystal, or Brad, or Andy, or Eric, or whomever. As an adult, it's just not sane to monopolize someone's life like you could "back in the day" of "best friends." Besides, work gets in the way too often anyway.

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

Primarily for myself, here are some rules our recent beta test taught me, in no particular order (but numbered for my own sanity):

1. Don't do open betas. People just like to use free software, and most of the reported bugs are worthless. "It crashed when I clicked on the toolbar."
2. Carefully select beta testers, and don't just let anyone in who asks. Make them confirm repeatedly that they'll contribute and pare out those who don't. Make sure that beta testers know that they're testing to find bugs, not to voice support for their pet features.
3. Beta tests must run at least one full month. Bring in new testers in the last week, and extend the deadline a week at a time until all major bugs have been squashed.
4. Ship at least four releases to beta testers, once a week or so. Any faster than that and some won't bother to upgrade.
5. Let beta testers have access to the bug logging software. Don't make it too hard to file a bug: request the minimum information. Version, steps to reproduce, crash log, and a screenshot if possible, along with a descriptive title.
6. Give free copies to anyone who's left at the end of the beta test. If they didn't do anything, they should have been given the boot earlier.
7. Make it clear at the beginning of the trial that beta testers can be booted at any time for any reason. Help out or get out.
8. Stick to your guns. Adding features during beta testing is the fastest way to delay product release, introduce new bugs, and cause problems.
9. Provide a list of all new bug fixes or changes with each release. Provide a list of the functionality that you wish people to bang on in particular for the current cycle.

Yep.

I'm giving Entourage 2004 a whirl today. In other words, I've received my copy and upgraded my v.X database to a 2004 database. My thoughts, as brief or as long as they turn out…

I won't be using the three-pane view: I like to see full-width emails, and I like to see all of my columns. I don't even use the preview pane - I open my emails in their own windows. My main window is as wide as I need to see the columns I need to see and as tall as I need to see all of my folders. The three-pane view can be seen here. I guess this means I won't be able to thread my messages either, which is a bit of a crock.

I couldn't care less about the project center: I use Entourage only from the Office suite. I won't use Entourage to organize my "other documents" because I have something to do that for me already: the Finder.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 800); »

Ten minutes after watching what I only today found out was the series finale of Las Vegas, this song comes up:

Erik is listening to "Leaving Las Vegas" by Sheryl Crow from the album "Tuesday Night Music Club" (1993). Erik has rated this song 4.0 stars and last played this song Wednesday, February 11, 2004 10:24:46 AM.

Bah. Fastlane, Las Vegas… what the hell? I'm hip. I'm 26. I spend money. What the hell television shows am I supposed to watch? I'll tell you: Las Vegas, Fastlane… >:-o

Question: If you could make $10,000/month working for a company that sent spam (as their primary role), would you?

My Answer: I'm not sure. For $4,000/month, no. $10,000/month is a lot of money… I think I'd accept after considering it for about 24 hours. Especially if my role wasn't directly related (i.e. IT support for the staff, managing the company's intranet site, etc. Yes, they're closely related, but not directly). And people know how much I despise spam, that's for sure. A search on my blog will tell ya that much about me.

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

We've kicked around ideas and even begun some initial coding for FTPeel 2.0. I won't say what they are because I'm curious what features you'd like to see. There are, of course, no guarantees that listing something here means it'll be included in FTPeel 2.0, but it will be considered.