NSLog();

Question: How far do you live from an appreciable source of water? What's the ideal distance?

My Answer: Like most apartment complexes in Florida, mine has a pond. If that doesn't count, a slightly bigger "lake"^* is 1/4 mile away, and the Atlantic Frickin' Ocean is about three.

I'd love to live right on the ocean. Y'know, if I had $600,000 or so to spare.

^* I grew up on Lake Erie, so these 20-acre lakes really don't look like more than a pond to me.

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

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Interface Builder? The pain in the ass better known as "trying to set a table view to use a certain font." The fonts panel doesn't update itself to reflect the current selection, the table view itself doesn't seem to update itself until you click off on another item - it's crap. It's pure, utter crap. Why is this so difficult? I can't even set a font for a text view sometimes. A text view for crissakes.

Why is all of this so freakin' hard? What the heck kind of crap is IB to do this to you? Pure, utter crap I tell ya.

</rant>

Question: Have you ever cheated on a test? Helped someone cheat? Been caught?

My Answer: If you define cheating as using resources that a teacher forgot to take, say, off of the chalkboard or off of the wall (a poster or two), then yes, I have. Otherwise, my answers are no, yes, and no.

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

PulpFiction beta testing continues. We've filled all of the slots, so don't ask to sign up. We've also just broken beneath the 100-bug threshhold. The vast majority of the bugs are nitpicky things - the exact kinds of things we care about a great deal as Mac users. Some of them can be fixed by clicking a checkbox or writing two lines of code.

We're still on target for a May 15 release. Beta testers who are reading this blog should IM me if they can't figure out the password for the beta blog… though that password is marked in bright yellow in the bug-tracking software, so if you have to ask, you're probably not a very good beta tester. 🙂

Question: What's the silliest thing you've ever convinced anyone was true?

My Answer: I'm not certain. Many of my friends (not I) smoke pot now and then, so it's pretty easy to convince them of things when they're high. Just today, for example, I convinced a friend of mine that if you searched Google for "google" it would go into an infinite loop.

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

I was so excited by EditCSS that I redesigned my blog's stylesheet. For those who are curious (or want to bitch or complain), check out the before and after shots for comparison.

I stumbled onto this post on coding conventions at a great time: I spent quite a few hours yesterday poking around PulpFiction's .h and .m files looking for quickie things to fix, comment, or otherwise KISS. My personal coding style closely mirrors that espoused at the page above, but as I looked through our code, I realized that we're not even very consistent amongst ourselves:

if (menu == nil)
{
    menu = [self menu];
}

// We ought to select the row that was right-clicked on just now...
// Select only if there's a row at that point and not already selected.
if (row >= 0 && ![self isRowSelected:row])
    [self selectRow:row byExtendingSelection:NO];

They're both one-line ifs! 🙂

Anyway, if you want to have a unified software development team, I think that it's important that every team member be comfortable with or at least tolerant of the coding conventions of his teammates. I've seen more than a few CVS battles start with one very simple command:

cvs commit -m 'reformatted code'

P.S. One rule about which I'm not very flexible: use TABS! Spaces suck.

Holy crap! EditCSS is freakin' awesome! Wowee. I wish only that I could have it in a separate window (or tie it to another text editor like BBEdit), but if that ain't just the definition of looking a gift horse in the mouth I don't know what is. Wow.

This post on Thunderbird's icons led me to this screenshot which led me to wonder whether I needed to buy Entourage 2004 (probably as part of the student/teacher edition).

I downloaded the latest version and gave it a try. It lasted all of five minutes. I won't go into the details, but suffice to say I'm not comfortable with it. I'm not comfortable with the fact that, even though I chose to create three POP accounts, Thunderbird insisted on creating separate folder structures for both, and then moved the Inbox for each to the bottom of the lists! Weird. Plus, I found no activity viewer window.

It looks nice, though. Even if it doesn't quite act like a Mac app. But it looks nice. See how seductive a nice appearance can be?

Apparently I treat software like women: seduced by a sophisticated appearance but quick to dismiss as not meeting my standards. Heh.

A few days ago, I held a little contest to try to find a great slogan for PulpFiction. Well, 94 responses later, I've got the list here. It's in the extended entry if you want to have a peek. I'll post results, uhh, when I have them.

For now, uhh, enjoy!

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 776); »

Question: What would you do to the head honchos of the RIAA if you could get away with anything?

My Answer: Death would be too easy. I'm a creative guy, but I think I'd have to spend some time coming up with a real game plan here. Perhaps it'd involve making the executives listen to the crap they now want to push on us for $2.49/song repeatedly (and loudly) while extracting $2.49 from their checking account every four minutes (you know, for eternity).

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

Question: Should Major League Baseball implement a salary cap?

My Answer: Hell yeah. I don't think they ever will, though. The player's associate is too powerful. I'm a small-market (Pittsburgh) fan, and these days, I'm wondering how they ever managed to win three pennants in a row as recent as the early 90s.

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

Why does Mac OS X's icon cache so easily get screwed up? The thing can't go five hours without showing hard disk icons on .txt files, Photoshop icons on .c files, and in the case below, three different icons on three different files.

What's worse, the only way to fix it seems to be to remove the ~/Library/Caches and log out!

Question: If you could date your high school sweetheart again (pretend you're single), would you?

My Answer: I would. We never dated the first time, and she's got a kid now, but she's still the same girl I remember. More digging is required to determine what's changed. Y'know, aside from the offspring.

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

I'm trying to work up a list of RSS/Atom/Bloggin/Subscription (etc.) resources at this page. If you've got a link (or twenty), a category, or anything to add, send me an IM today at "i a c a s" (no spaces). Thanks.