May 2009
49 posts
4 tags
I should mention that there’s more to come on the subject of lockless algorithms on OS X. I have a bunch of things planned but the real juicy ones are all [REDACTED].
5 tags
Lockless lazily-initialized static/global...
So we all know (or we should) about the potential perils of double-checked locking. These can be mostly mitigated by judicious use of the volatile keyword, at least in languages which support it, but in this wonderful world of multi-core and multi-processor development, there are still some problems[PDF] to be aware of (there’s optimizing-compiler theory in there; if that scares you, just...
It's Towel Day →
Make sure you know where your towel is, folks.
2 tags
So Eucalyptus is now approved, but the author now has other problems to worry about:
Ola
Uhm, your app does not seem to do anything else than Stanza - which is free. I don’t see the point of buying it
steve
you put project gutenberg in the apps tore and you think you deserve ten bucks for that? more like things made out of other people’s things
Yet another user says he’ll wait until...
“The Government has rejected claims that it is conducting too much surveillance...”
– Government rejects Lords’ surveillance criticism • The Register
In essence, the government’s response seems to be of the “is not”/”is too” variety.
Another choice quote: “It is the responsibility of the House[s of Parliament] to scrutinise...
“The biggest constraint on the number of new startups that get created in the US...”
– The Founder Visa—Paul Graham
He makes a very salient point. The immigration process for the US right now is kinda focussed in a ‘protect our American jobs’ direction, but this comes at the expense of letting people from outside the US *create* new jobs. Not all of us are looking for...
GHUnit — iPhone-compatible Unit Testing for... →
Judging by the project’s goals, this should be pretty darned cool:
Runs unit tests within XCode, allowing you to fully utilize the XCode Debugger.
Ability to run from Makefile’s or the command line.
A simple GUI to help you visualize your tests.
Show stack traces.
Be embeddable as a framework (using @rpath) for Mac OSX apps, or as a static library in your iPhone projects.
Mocks
Beware of MobileMe phishing scam →
Let’s make this one household news, people— the people who’ll be bitten by this aren’t likely to read tech blogs like TUAW (or this one, for that matter).
Spread the word.
Yahoo Limits Mobile Development to One Platform →
They’re going iPhone-only. No more mobile apps for Blackberry, Android, Symbian, or Windows Mobile. I think Jeff LaMarche’s statement covers it nicely:
“Wow.”
“Motoryacht?”
– Daring Fireball Linked List: Wired Can’t Sell Ads
Isn’t that supposed to be pronounced “throat-wobbler-mangrove” ?
“how lame, that new MS ad shows them using a MacBook and yet shows the price of...”
– via @rosyna
Originally it just seemed weird that they didn’t look at the regular MacBook at all. Now it appears that they did, and just *claimed* it cost twice as much. Makes one wonder if the ‘twice as much’ was referring to the Pro price as compared to the regular MacBook?
5 tags
Memory-Tracking →
I was asked about this on StackOverflow, so I figured I’d put the memory-statistics-fetcher routines from Outpost up on github as a gist. Note that this gives a somewhat different value for allocated memory than ObjectAlloc will tell you; this is because it’s showing the total resident memory size of the application, not just the amount of memory allocated using malloc() and suchlike.
...
An unthinking programmer's guide to the new C++ •... →
This makes me glad I don’t have to use C++ any more.
1 tag
“Microsoft’s jab here is not at Apple, it’s at owning your music. And most people...”
– The Macalope Weekly: Fight, fight, fight!
“If you’re actively choosing to rendering in Quirks mode, stop doing that. No,...”
– IE8 and the X-UA-Compatible situation | FarukAt.eş
“Amazon says it will take 70 percent of all subscription sales and deliver 30...”
– Amazon puts any blog on the Kindle, for a price | Entertainment & HDTV | Macworld
“This button I have to click to add your blog’s RSS feed to the one the Kindle Store uses is really hard to click, so I deserve most of the money.”
In other news, Amazon will shortly unveil a...
“George R.R. Martin is not your bitch.”
– Neil Gaiman’s Journal: Entitlement issues…
(via @feliciaday)
“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ban the words ‘Unlimited’ in...”
– Sign It (via iamdanw) (via nikf)
People outside the UK probably don’t realise how silly this is right now. ‘Unlimited’ is used as a synonym for ‘a finite large amount’ more or less as standard. Often the excuse (for download caps, perhaps) would be that you can...
“any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by...”
– Twitter Blog: We Learned A Lot
Yeah, because everyone wants to ignore the ‘reply’ button, and it’s so not useful at all for followers to be able to easily find the tweet to which their idol is replying. Obviously.
If the prior implementation didn’t scale, then it...
“Okay,” he said in disappointed tone, “well now I know you’re lying. I mean...”
– The Daily WTF
Politics Explained
ohlarissa:
PURE SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and puts them in a barn with everyone else’s cows. You have to take care of all of the cows. The government gives you as much milk as you need.
BUREAUCRATIC SOCIALISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and put them in a barn with everyone else’s cows. They are cared for by ex-chicken farmers. You have to take...
“Myriad’s monopoly on the BRCA genes makes it impossible for women to use other...”
– PUBPAT > Breast Cancer Gene Patents
I have a number of close relatives who’ve had breast cancer. On more than one occasion, in fact. Money-grabbing twats like this are half the reason these things recur.
marco:
What that they don’t understand, maybe, is that being a real geek is a very bad thing for a lot of people. Geeks generally had a pretty rough time in school, socially, and rarely have much romantic success during the first portion (if not the entirety) of their lives. Many have crippling social or psychological problems that severely limit their ability to interact with others or work on...
“So the main appeal of netbooks is they’re small and cheap, but the problem with...”
– The Macalope
“[Microsoft claims] that it would cost $30,000US to fill a 120 gigabyte iPod with...”
– The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)
As TUAW points out, there’s some fuzzy math behind these claims, and I’m sure we’ve all seen the arguments dissecting this particular claim (“I already own that much music”, “I want to keep what I pay for without paying a...
maniacalrage:
Also, Shawn is wrong.
I haven’t even seen the film yet, and I cannot help but concur. That’s just how wrong he is.
Today I posted a whole bunch of stuff and liked other people’s posts. Net change to my Tumblarity as a result?
A 24% drop.
Well, pardon me for trying, I’m sure.
Perhaps strangely, it went up a whole bunch a couple days ago, despite my making a single post & doing nothing else. *shrugs*
1 tag
“[Phillipines Customs Undersecretary Espele Sales] reinterpreted the Florence...”
– Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Dispatches From Manila.
1 tag
No reviews from beta versions of iTunes and iPhone...
mrgan:
Proposal for a simple change to the App Store: those running pre-release versions of the iPhone OS and iTunes (which is now required to install the OS) should not be allowed to rate and review apps. I bring this up because I’ve seen reviews where dudes slap on a single star plus the useless comment, “this app crashes on 3.0.”
Amen.
symbolicatecrash can kiss my arse
So I just spent all this evening debugging the fixed version of symbolicatecrash, attempting to see why it wasn’t working for me. I found a few bugs, fixed them (eventually—Perl is a language I’ve not used extensively, and not at all for about 10 years). Here I’ll go through what I had to change & why.
It all boiled down to the large regular expression used to pull out the...
1 tag
More on Investors
It was pointed out to me on Twitter that investors are theoretically sharing the expertise that earned them their pots of money. My response didn’t really fit terribly well in the available space there, so I decided to expand upon it here.
The problem with investors’ experience in making money is that they (usually) come from a very different background. They don’t make money by...
“The whole investor relationship is completely flawed. They have money and you...”
– Six Sites » Why I hate Investors
Brian Fling on investors vs. entrepreneurs. Having experienced it first-hand myself, I’d have to say I agree with his assessment.
Lame Mac 'email worm' limps into view • The... →
Written in RealBasic and riddled with bugs. Yeah, that’ll work. How would one exploit buffer overruns via RealBasic anyway— I mean, duh
“Since Wolverine topped the movie charts, maybe the MPAA can shut the f*ck up...”
– Wil Wheaton on Twitter — this came from Reddit apparently, although I wasn’t able to find it there just now.
“Research In Motion’s BlackBerry Curve overtook Apple’s iPhone to...”
– BlackBerry Curve outsells the iPhone 3G | Wireless - CNET News
In other words, by giving away 50% of their stock for free, they were able to shift more units than those companies that require an actual, you know, purchase. Well, duh.
In other news, Morfunk is now giving every purchaser 147 copies...
WatchOkay, this has everything: The platinum pipes of Jack Black, the wit & creativity of Tim Schafer, and of course a good heavy helping of
ROCK
*And yes, that was SO worth uploading new web-fonts and doing an explicit CSS style for.
3 tags
“All the other moms in Henry’s playgroup were appalled that Apple had...”
– Daniel Jalkut
Kinda tells you why Apple implements such stringent processes for the approval of new apps. Of course, no-one believes that until it fails, and something like this happens.
