Paint the Tiger, Carve the Swan » Asides

Why do that? Really?

Matt — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 01:20:27 +0000

I have been searching for cheaper ways to buy textbooks (it’s crazy to pay $120 for a text, IMHO). I’ve chanced across www.textbookexchange.com.au. Let’s examine the workflow when trying to find a book there.

Visit the site.
Type in the name of the book or author.
Press “Search”
Be redirected to a login page.
Have to type in the name again because you were redirected back to the home page, rather than your search results.

I mean, seriously. It’s not that hard to keep some handle on state and redirect to the search results.

If I hadn’t saved so much money buying my books this way I wouldn’t use their stupid site!

Compiler Construction, or Game Development?

Matt — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:30:31 +0000

As a class, we have the choice of what the focus of one of my topics this semester is going to be.

I’m voting for Compiler Construction. Even though we’ll be doing it in Java (ugh!), it is something I was disappointed to find wasn’t otherwise offered.

If you need convincing, read Stevey’s Blog Rants: Rich Programmer Food.

Now, if only I can convince the rest of the class!

From the Xcode-Users list…

Matt — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:39:42 +0000

How do you pronounce XIB?

I’d say it as ZIB. You know, like xylophone?

Testing Modified ecto-Twitter addon.

Matt — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 01:45:46 +0000

As the man says…

Creating a new Avatar.

Matt — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 08:12:22 +0000

Can you tell I’m procrastinating?

I’ve spent the last little while using Acorn to create a new Avatar. Here are some ideas.

#1 Fix for Twitterific

Matt — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 03:00:04 +0000

It annoys me that when I click off the Twitterrific window, it doesn’t auto-hide. There doesn’t seem to be a setting to make this happen.

Luckily, you can fix this with a quick edit to the MainMenu.nib file.

(This requires you have InterfaceBuilder, and therefore the developer tools installed.)

View the contents of the Twitterrific.app package, and navigate to the Resources/English.lproj directory, and open up MainMenu.nib. Find the Tweet Window, and change it’s properties to “Hide on Deactivate”.

Save the nib, and restart Twitterrific. Bingo, clicking off the window auto-hides.

Twitter

Matt — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 04:18:19 +0000

I registered for Twitter ages ago, but only recently started actually using it all of the time.

http://twitter.com/schinckel

XCode 3.1 and “Availability”

Matt — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 01:52:51 +0000

You can’t have a class with the name “Availability” in a project built with XCode 3.1.

You can with XCode 3.0, but CFNetwork, and I assume a heap of other classes use a class called “Availability” to define if objects are available in a particular version of the OS.

Adding Extra MIME-types to WordPress.

Matt — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 01:16:41 +0000

(Site Admin) → Options → Mime types

File Extension/Associated mime-type.

Add mime-type »

120 Feeds and no New News?

Matt — Thu, 29 May 2008 08:54:26 +0000

I subscribe to 120+ feeds, from mostly MacOS X related sites, but a few others.

From 9am onwards today, I don’t think I got a single new news item.

This is just so that people who subscribe to my feed actually get at least one new item :).

(Update: Apparently something was wrong with NetNewsWire - It just wasn’t downloading anything. A restart of the application fixed it. 70 items - that’s much more like it ).