NSLog();

One of my sig files says "there are no such things as stupid questions, only stupid people who ask questions." Though I don't find that to be true (not all the time, anyway), it is fairly humorous.

However, I have noticed that people like to ask questions, and that's a good thing. That people are lazy is not. Unfortunately, the two often collide when lazy people ask questions - questions to which they could have found the answers had they not been so lazy.

Mark Pilgrim talks about this in an article titled "Why We Won't Help You." That reminded me of a long-ago-written article by ESR called How to Ask Questions the Smart Way.

Both are good reading for anyone who's inquisitive, but especially for those who are inquisitive and lazy.

I'm working on a sub-site for a client, and after delivering a design that matches his (upcoming) site, he sent me a URL to another site and basically said "copy that." Ugh.

I'm fine with it. It's his site. The time I spend waffling on designs I don't bill for anyway, so this will save me all of that time. The part I hate? Looking through another person's code. This site wasn't too bad - it wasn't created by GoLive or FrontPage or anything - but ugh. Different spacing tactics, naming tactics, etc. Ugh. I spent three hours just cleaning up the code for one page.

And don't get me started on their over-use of images instead of text. I'm not going to spend 20 hours reproducing their images in a new color scheme, no sir. Much easier to delete 1k of text and replace it with a textual link that's styles via CSS. Much easier.

I'm taking a break. I can't seem to force Mac OS X Server's copy of Apache to not cache pages, resulting in even more frustration. Upload new picture, flush browser cache, super-reload, and… see old version? Load just that image, see old image? Delete image from server, flush browser cache, super-reload image… see old image? The one that doesn't even exist on the server anymore?

Ugh. This may be my last entry for the day.

Smooch is what you do with someone you like. Wooo baby! Death to Smoochie was supposedly a very bad, bad movie, but I like Edward Norton. I need to rent the Robin Williams (he's also in the movie) thing where he splashes water on himself. Live on Broadway is it called? I don't know. It was pretty funny stuff. Robin's Audible.com stuff is hilarious, and normally I'm not a fan of his type of humor, but when he and Whoopi or Bonnie Hunt or whoever start going off about stuff, it's freakin' great!

This 60-second entry was brought to you by today's word from OneWord™.

Question: If you could communicate with any type of animal, what would it be?

My Answer: I first wanted to say "humans." But it didn't ask "communicate perfectly," and I can already just "communicate," so I'm going to have to go with dogs. Though come to think of it, I already communicate with dogs, too. My dog, anyway. So maybe it really does mean communicate perfectly, in which case I'll say humans again. 🙂

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

Whenever I'm bored for five minutes I pop in on #macdev.

	PfhorSlayer1 has uncompressed Halo's .map data.
mikeash: o no!
	mikeash flees in abject horror
	PfhorSlayer1 is professor chaos!
PfhorSlaye: B-bow before Professor Chaos! Mwhah!
mikeash: Professor Chaos, what a lame name
mikeash: even lamer than Dr. Evil
iacas: why was it compressed?
mikeash: because Bungie is Evil
iacas: oh, yeah
PfhorSlaye: iacas, no clue. The game is on a fucking DVD!
	iacas thinks back to the time he saw Halo at Macworld…
mikeash: are the files really big or something?
PfhorSlaye: Well, it would be faster to read it off the disc.
iacas: maybe the decompression takes less time than the reading

Uh huh. Geeks indeed. All of us.

I'm rarely on iChat, but when I am, I like to look at my friend's away messages:

It's funny what you can tell about a person by their away message, or at least the mood they're in at the time. Some are boring, some are cute, some are an inside joke.

Adam's post on the glass ceiling of a college degree prompted me to think of why I finished my degree¹. College served a few purposes for me that I couldn't have gotten any other way:

• Helped me mature as a person. Never again in your life are you forced to deal with situations that arise in college, but they help you prepare for similar situations - and people - later in life.
• Helped me mature as a thinker. I'm intelligent, and I'm sure I could figure things out eventually, but being forced to wade through so much helps you learn new learning techniques.
• Helped me learn to budget. My time, my money, and other things.
• Provided a way to "ease into" the real world: more responsibility without too much financial pain if I goofed up.
• Got me that slip of paper.

That "slip of paper" is important. Regardless of how little it means to you, it tends to mean a lot to a potential employer. Given that, it's odd how many of them never bother to check its validity…

¹ Major in medicinal chemistry, minors in computer science and French (not kissing - got an honorary doctorate in that one, baby!).

I want to move to Okinawa. Says my friend Heinrich:

It's gorgeous! The water is crystal clear… The beachas are clean, the people are nice, and there is no crime.

Ahhh, but he also says they need Japan, even though they're trying to secede. They need that yen. I can do my job from anywhere, why not Okinawa? There are bound to be more brunettes than in southern Florida, no?

When I first moved to Florida I worked for a company I'll call "HS." One of the perks of the job was that I could cross a hallway, grab a Coke from a fridge, and drink it. I had to write my company name on a piece of paper, so they could be billed for the Coke, but we were encouraged (and of course allowed) to drink and eat (they had some chips and things too) all we wanted.

I estimate that I drank about three cans of Coke/day, sometimes four if I skipped lunch. At $0.75/can that comes to $3/day, and about (30*5/7 = 21 work days/month) $63/month. I was on the high end - Alison and Dave rarely drank, occasionally having a water or a bag of chips. So let's say $50/month/employee, and that's if they get ripped off on the cost of Coke.

NSLog(@"Finish Reading %d Words", 999); »

Look what I've discovered (no, I don't think I'm the first by a long shot). Cover art appears in the iTunes visualizer next to the track name, artist, and CD. Nifty neat-o!

I'm going through the process, as I re-encode my CDs into 192 AAC, of grabbing CD cover art off of CDNow.com (now part of Amazon). Why not Wal-Mart.com, which has bigger versions of the cover art? Because CDNow Amazon's is big enough for me, thank you veddy much.¹

¹ Lame Taxi and Andy Kaufman reference.

Wal-Mart sucks for music. I went to two Wal-Marts today, one of them a not-so-"Super Wal-Mart," and neither had either of the CDs I was looking for:

• Bend it Like Beckham soundtrack
• R.E.M.'s Green

I've been trying to track down BiLB for quite some time now. My copy of Green on the other hand looks even better than most of my other CDs, but refuses to play for whatever reason. I can't re-rip all of my CDs into 192 AAC if they refuse to work for whatever reason! Maybe I can return the bad one and tell them it won't work… What would that get me? Another copy of Green? Maybe I can get a different CD…

BTW, I got both CDs for < $28 at Barnes & Noble's music store. Plus that gave me a chance to pick up another Bada Bing! from Jones Soda. Reminder to self: take Jamie to see Bend it Like Beckham before it leaves theaters. It's a "girl power in a good way" movie she should enjoy.

One last thing: my pal Jason pointed out that you can get the 12:29 live version of November Rain for $0.99. Nice. 🙂

Andy and I are working hard on PulpFiction today. Our next challenge was in presenting a list of folders in an outline view. The folders are stored in a database, and so when Cocoa calls this method, we need to have an answer ready:

- (id)outlineView:(NSOutlineView *)outlineView child:(int)index ofItem:(id)item

There's no guarantee that it'll query our database in any order, and databases just don't keep order anyway. Each item in the database could maintain an "orderID" but in a list of 100, if someone moves item 92 to the second position, you've got to instantly UPDATE another 91 items or so. Additions to the list, subtractions - every action would result in tons of UPDATEs.

Our solution was (is currently) to store an array in the prefs. The array keeps the order, can match the "index" of the method call, and can simply map to an NSString (we'd use an NSNumber, but the database returns only strings of course). This NSString is the unique folderID. Easy enough. Subfolders will point to an NSDictionary containing the name of the folder and an array. And so on.

This is something I call "arbitrary order" of a database. Yes, there are "ORDER BY" statements, but they typically sort on things like "product_name" or "date_added" or whatever. Suppose you're building a DB-driven site for a customer who wants to list his products in whatever order he wants. Suppose he's got 100 products. Talk about a headache. I've never found a solution I like, that's for sure.

I've tried to resist the urge to comment on how funny the whole "crashes IE" thing is, but as Mark points out, the bug affects everything that uses the IE renderer. That includes email clients and whatnot.

The bug?

<html> 
<form> 
<input type> 
</form> 
</html>

In other words, an input with a type and no = afterwards. Funny how simple some bugs can be, and how some of the simplest bugs can escape attention for so long.

Thanks to Arcterex for scanning in an image from a newspaper, here I give you 10 Tidbits About Sneaky Rob. In no particular order…

1. Rob scored a 1420 on his SAT. He's a smart cookie.
2. Rob graduated from the honors program at SUNY Oswego with a Bachelor of Arts degree in broadcasting, and he received an A on his senior thesis, The Impact of Reality Television. He's literally schooled in Survivor.
3. Rob is a guy's guy, having been a member of Sigma Chi.

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Andy and I had an interesting discussion today regarding an app we're working on called PulpFiction¹. I really like how I can be with Andy in discussion: somewhat abrasive and very forceful. When he gives the right answer, or says the thing that convinces me of his idea, then I immediately say "good, let's do it." It's an odd thing, this three-person company we have going on, because every time Nick or Andy say "how would you like it" I feel compelled to immediately ask them the same. After all, my ideas are no better than theirs and I really want our products to be the result of a triple mind-meld.

Anyway, this design decision is one which shapes not only how the user interacts with our program, but how our code is structured. It'll shape the AppleScript interface and the human interface. It will shape how easy our application is to use and how well it scaled to "pro" use. It's an interesting decision.

I think we made the right one, at least for now. I heard a story of someone who once said "Decisions in 60 seconds or less or the next one's free." Or something like that. We're all smart people, Andy, Nick, and I, and after we feel we know enough, we make a decision. Snap! And it is done.

¹ I can give the name because it's just a code name. "Pulp" deals with "Freshly Squeezed" and "Fiction" is a logical given the movie of the same title. Nobody ever said code names have to mean anything.