NSLog();

Question: What's your favorite card game?

My Answer: I like Poker, but the game I've had the most fun playing has got to be Hearts. My mom, grandma, and sister had some brutal games of Hearts as recently as five years ago. Just brutal!

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

I'm trying to get my album artwork in order, largely due to the fact that I realize how little of my songs have album artwork. Unfortunately, iTunes offers no "has no album artwork" smart playlist option. Bummer. 🙁

So, anyway, I'm working on it. iTunes Catalog has largely proven useless - wal-mart.com it is for me. (iTC is good for other things: not so much finding [large] album artwork.)

I even made my own CD cover for any "Live" albums.

Update: I'm up to Bend it Like Beckham. And yes, I'm working A-Z through my albums (not my artists like iTC). I'm done for the evening.

Question: How many computers do you currently own? How many no longer work but serve as nostalgic pieces?

My Answer: Four and two. I still use an eMate 300 I've got, so it's in the first group. The latter contains two original Macs that may or may not work - I haven't tried to turn them on in years.

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

Dave Hyatt talks about coding to standards accepting malformed content. I, like David, want want a browser that doesn't accept crap, or even a browser with a "No Crap" mode. Unfortunately, such a browser would limit my browsing to this blog and the FSS site (and even they wouldn't be available sometimes).

iCab used to have a smiley face that rarely, if ever, smiled. iCab failed as a validator because it never really supported CSS. Now it doesn't support XHTML, remaining useless. Omni Group had a huge opportunity, in hindsight, to add validation features to OmniWeb 5.0. I'd pay (again) for those! Instead, based on the OmniWeb 5.0 previews, it seems Web developers will have to satisfy ourselves by creating bookmarklets to http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=?.

How could Omni Group have earned another $30 from me (and a whole heap of thanks)? Easy. They could have added a drawer to the main window which, when open, showed validation results. I might leave such a drawer open full-time out of curiosity! With this Validation Drawer, I'd have one window with both content and validation results - form and function, appearance and compatibility. The Validation Drawer would mean that Web designers on the Mac would have little excuse for creating malformed pages.

Currently, validation is an exercise for the non-lazy. Validation requires a lot of copy/paste, at least one more window, and a lot of reloading (of two windows). That may not sound like much work in the end, but it can feel like a daunting task when you have 50 pages to validate because you haven't done it in awhile. How often do developers visit their own sites? Fairly often. How often do they validate? Almost never. A Validation Drawer which remained open would narrow that ratio to 1:1 - they'd be getting validation (or alerts for non-conformity) every time they visited.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 501); »

I've quietly snuck onto the Web late in the evening (or early in the morning) and posted updates to FTPeel 1.1 and MailDrop 1.3.1. Change lists are here and here. You can download these updates here and here.

Good night. Tomorrow morning I'll update VT, MU, and send the email to our list members.

Question: Now that you've had a chance to play with Panther's Finder sidebar, what do you think?

My Answer: I use mine extensively. The sidebar contains my iDisk (I rarely use this), Network (again, rarely), and one of my two HDs. Beneath the bar I've got /Applications, ~/, ~/Documents/Downloads, ~/Desktop, an FSS folder, and ~/Sites.

I still have space for one or two more items, but along the top I have "clickable" or "droppable" items: Open Terminal Here, a resource fork-removing AppleScript droplet, this blog's "imgs" folder, and a FileMaker database into which I put A.Word.A.Day emails daily.

So, to recap: navigational things along the side, droppable/clickables along the top. And all in only about 32 pixels of "wasted" space. Suffice to say: I like my sidebar just fine, thank you veddy much!

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

Freshly Squeezed Software is hiring, tentatively. Interested applicants should be well-versed in Cocoa as well as have a good understanding of networking. We accept a lot of on-the-job learning (every programmer learns on the job), but we don't want a newbie. For that matter, we're not offering a career either, so hard-core 24/7 type programmers are out of the question as well. Someone in the middle: a college student with entirely too much free time, a late-20's hacker with a boring day job, whatever.

The primary function of any new hire would be to work on and complete MailDrop 2.0.

Please IM me at "iacas" (which I use with Adium) or the same thing @mac.com (iChat; I prefer the former) and state your purpose quickly so I don't dump you into my spambots group. 🙂

Yesterday I added two "Essentials" albums and the "Top 100 of 2003" from the iTunes Music Store. Ever since, when I try to access my shopping cart (for paring), I am told:

Joy.

When I click my shopping cart, I see "Accessing Music Store" for a few minutes before this error appears. Activity Monitor shows no real network traffic. I'm on a high-speed Internet connection (2.5 Mbps down), and I've got about $130 in my shopping cart, yet I have no way of giving Apple (well, the recording labels, anyway) my money.

Hrmph.

Question: If you were going to institute a flat tax, what would the terms be? If you're so against the flat tax that you can't think of any terms, why?

My Answer: The first $25,000 is free. No tax. After that, income is taxed at 40%. A paycheck of $1500 every two weeks ($3k/month, so about $36k/year) would net you $961 untaxed ($25,000/26 paychecks) and $323 in taxed income (60% of the remaining $539) for a total of $1284.

This solves one of the problems of a flat tax - that it hurts the poor far more than the wealthy - but doesn't avoid the other problem: that wealthy people would easily be able to afford lawyers to find loopholes. After all, most wealthy people don't exactly get paychecks every two weeks.

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

Yes, we just released build 10, but here is Rock Star build 11. Grab it from the same location as before. This time the file is 1.4 MB, not 11.3.

What's New In Build 11

• now graciously asks user to locate iTunes folder if it isn't at its expected location (~/Music/iTunes/) and stores the selected path as a user default so it will know the next time where to look
• checks before displaying playlists if the user even has any playlists at all that have at least 25 eligible songs; if not, simply displays a message screen explaining the problem
• we now display a dialog on first launch asking the user if they want to use full screen or windowed modes; we save whatever mode user was in upon quitting and then start up in that respective mode on next launch
• fixed a bug whereby the first score is always the score shown at the end, regardless of what the player did during that game
• we now kick anything that is not MP3, AAC (protected or unprotected), AIFF, and WAV
• we now kick tracks classified as "Spoken Word" and "Books & Spoken" in their genre
• added key equivalents to all the game screens so you can use it without a mouse if you'd like
• you can now double-click a playlist to start the game
• answer choices are now clickable
• added the icon
• we now only reload the XML file if it was modified after the last time we loaded it
• fixed the infinite loop bug reported by Simon Jacquier

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

Some folks are discussing whether "10 million Mac OS X users" is really the same as "the transition is essentially complete." They say Apple is ignoring 60% of its market. Some simple math backs up Apple's statement.

Apple ships around 500,000 computers per quarter. Macs need a G3 and USB ports to run Panther, and such machines have been available since late 1998 - that's 22 quarters of "capable Macs." (2 in 1998, four each in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003). 22 quarters x 500,000 machines/quarter = 11 million machines capable of running Mac OS X.

If we consider that there are about 25 million active Mac users, then clearly about 14 million Mac users are using machines incapable of running Mac OS X. 11/25 = 0.44. In other words, nearly everyone capable of running Mac OS X is.

The transition is complete. Those with machines incapable of running Mac OS X will be running it when they buy a new machine. You can't market an OS to people with hardware incapable of running it - you market hardware to those people.

This isn't rumor. This isn't speculation. It's simple math. Nearly everyone capable of running Mac OS X is running it.

The transition to Mac OS X is complete.

If you'd like to download an in-progress copy of Rock Star, you may do so here. There are quite a few things left to be done:

• Multiplayer game
• High Score Implementation (local and Web-based)
• A bug regarding the score at the end of the game
• Weeding out of some more file types (.aa, "Spoken Word" genre, etc.)
• Some UI enhancements
• Complete directions
• Registration setup
• Preferences

If you've got any feedback, leave it below in the comments. Please police duplicates yourself and refrain from saying "me too" unless you have more to offer on a particular item. I believe that this version (no high scores, no multiplayer) will eventually end up as the demo version, so here you go! Play around, have fun.

P.S. Some quick notes: Requires 10.3.x. Caps Lock pauses. Cmd-Opt-A toggles full-screen or windowed mode.

Question: On a scale of 1-10, how well has Bush done? 1 = shitty, 10 = awesome.

My Answer: I'm the last guy you want to ask about politics, but as much of the "policy" put into place by the current administration affects me or the things in which I am interested in (not to mention things everyone is interested in, like sanctity of life and privacy), I've read more about Bush than most former presidents. I'd have to give him a 3. Heck, Bush and West Wing have me leaning towards the Democratic side of things more than ever.

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

So, in the next month or two I will have all of about eight days off. That's what a six-day work week brings you. But hey, I asked for it and a person on my team was let go. Things will be better this way, probably for everyone involved.

FWIW, Sunday is my new "day off" for awhile.

Question: How many times, if any, have you been to Cupertino? Do you want to go for the first time or again?

My Answer: I've been to the iHolyLand about eight times. iPlan to return, perhaps for WWDC 2004^*. Ooh, that reminds me - I've gotta renew my ADC membership in February…

^* Yes, I know WWDC is now in San Francisco. It's about an hour's drive to Cupertino, and I'd make that drive.

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