iAppViews
Nicholas Riley links to iAppViews, code by Evan Jones that apparently demonstrates best practices for alternating background colors in NSTableView and NSOutlineView.
Archive for March 28, 2003
Can You Hear Me Now? I Hope Not!
If I’m pissed off, I assure you that I won’t leave it to an ambiguous sentence for you to infer my mood. I will let you know it.
bbhexdiff
bbhexdiff is a Perl script that uses the command-line hexdump tool and BBEdit’s Find Differences command to compare hex dumps of files. As the name suggests, it’s somewhat based on John Gruber’s bbdiff command.
Teststands
Create a new, empty project. Set it up as you like it, so it’s easy for you to use. Include your favorite libraries, and turn off the optimizers (which slow down compilation and make low-level debugging more difficult). Now leave it, empty, sitting there. This is your teststand.
XML Doesn’t Suck
Recently in this space I complained that XML is too hard for programmers. That article got Slashdotted and was subsequently read by over thirty thousand people; I got a lot of feedback, quite a bit of it intelligent and thought-provoking. This note will argue that XML doesn't suck, and discuss some of the issues around the difficulties encountered by programmers.
(Perl|Python|Ruby) on (.NET|JVM)
Parrot architect Dan Sugalski explains why the two big VMs are poorly suited for dynamic languages. He then demystifies closures without mentioning Lisp and promises a similar treatise on continuations (which the JScheme folks also decided not to support on the JVM).
Copying and Equality
Operations in Lisp, Scheme, and other dynamically-typed languages typically dispatch on representational type information rather than intentional type information. Several broad classes of bugs and confusions can be traced to improper attempts to recover intentional type information from representation types.
Studying Programming Languages
I just heard about this paper by languages guru Daniel P. Friedman.
Continuations
In the early history of continuations, basic concepts were independently discovered an extraordinary number of times. This was due less to poor communication among computer scientists than to the rich variety of settings in which continuations were found useful.
Cocoa Widgets
Stephane Sudre shares his code for implementing Mail.app-style search fields and Date & Time–style text fields.
Ben & Mena
Steven Frank has written a song about blogging. It’s clever. Right up there with James Dempsey’s songs about EO and reference counting.
Maya
Maya Personal Learning Edition™ is a special version of Maya®, which provides free access to Maya Complete™ software for non-commercial use.
MagicHat
MagicHat reconstructs @interfaces from Objective-C frameworks and attempts to find the corresponding header files and documentation. Unlike class-dump, it provides a real human interface, although it’s more difficult to use MagicHat on arbitrary files.
Algorithmic Information Theory
Most work on computational complexity is concerned with time. However this course will try to show that program-size complexity, which measures algorithmic information, is of much greater philosophical significance. I’ll discuss how one can use this complexity measure to study what can and cannot be achieved by formal axiomatic mathematical theories. In particular, I’ll show (a) that there are natural information-theoretic constraints on formal axiomatic theories, and that program-size complexity provides an alternative path to incompleteness from the one originally used by Kurt Gödel. Furthermore, I’ll show (b) that in pure mathematics there are mathematical facts that are true for no reason, that are true by accident. These have to do with determining the successive binary digits of the precise numerical value of the halting probability W for a “self-delimiting” universal Turing machine. I believe that these meta-theorems (a,b) showing (a) that the complexity of axiomatic theories can be characterized information-theoretically and (b) that God plays dice in pure mathematics, both strongly suggest a quasi-empirical view of mathematics. I.e., math is different from physics, but perhaps not as different as people usually think. I’ll also discuss the convergence of theoretical computer science with theoretical physics, Leibniz’s ideas on complexity, Stephen Wolfram’s book A New Kind of Science, and how to attempt to use information theory to define what a living being is.
Real World Adobe GoLive 6
Jeff Carlson and Glenn Fleishman:
We seem to have incurred a huge bandwidth bill.
MulleEOInterface
The MulleEOInterface framework is a binary replacement for the EOInterface framework that Apple delivered in their Objective-C version of WebObjects (4.5). It's the link between EOControl and AppKit. With EOInterface you could conceivably - if you had a IB palette - easily create fairly complex desktop applications using Interface Builder and no code at all!
Hungarian Notation
Joel on Software has a discussion about Hungarian notation, which I think is generally counterproductive.
Source Code In Database
We have been teaching our customers to regard their data as a precious resource that should be milked and reused by finding many possible ways of summarising, viewing and updating it. However, we programmers have not yet learned to treat our source code as a similar structured data resource.
Generalizing Polymorphism With Multimethods
Object-oriented programming gains much of its versatility through polymorphism: objects of different kinds can behave in similar ways, given the right contexts. But most OOP programming is single dispatch; that is, just one designated object determines which code path is taken. Conceptually, a more general technique is to allow all the arguments to a function/method to determine its specialization. This article presents an implementation of multiple dispatch in Python, and shows examples where this makes for better programs.
DiskWarrior Rocks
Good thing my Mac can boot into OS 9. DiskWarrior 3, which is OS X–native, isn’t out yet, and last week I had to use DiskWarrior 2 to fix my internal drive before the Mac would even boot. So much for a stable operating system protecting against catalog damage. DiskWarrior is great, but with all the files Mac OS X installs it takes hours and hours to run. I wonder what Alsoft plans for PlusOptimizer.
Meta-CVS
Here’s an interesting alternative to Subversion.
Meta-CVS is a version control system built around CVS. Although it retains most of the features of CVS, including all of the networking support, it is more capable than CVS, and easier to use.
LaTeX
Kai von Fintel links to information about using LaTeX with Keynote and using PostScript fonts with LaTeX.
PyTextile
PyTextile is a Python port of Textile, Dean Allen’s Humane Web Text Generator. It supports all the features of the original, with the exception of converting high-bit characters to their HTML numeric entity equivalent, because that’s some bad-ass PHP goin’ on and I don’t pretend to understand it.
By the way, Pilgrim’s Dive Into Python is fabulous.
Java Programming Guidelines
Bruce Eckel’s Thinking In Java includes some guidelines that apply to other languages as well.
Software Development
While it is certainly beneficial to pattern some software after real-world objects, it really doesn’t make sense to think of developing software as constructing buildings.
Peter Schmies’s Word Classification Test
This looks like fun, but it also looks like it would take a long time to get through all 200 words.
Quote of the Day
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
—Benjamin Franklin
