The previously mentioned teach-myself-to-program-Cocoa-apps app is now available in a more-or-less feature-complete beta version.
The program is called Checkpoint, and is used to calculate scores for a certain style of time-speed-distance road rally. It’s something I had first tried to put together as a pure JavaScript+HTML app à la TiddlyWiki (but without the ability to save), and then as a (buggy) Ruby on Rails app I ran on my laptop. Then I realized that it’s probably one of the few apps that really makes sense to run as a pure desktop application.
Anyway, on the off chance that you think you might find this sort of thing useful, follow the link above. It’s free as in beer and runs on Mac OS X 10.4 and later.
“You need a healthy ego to endure the abuse that comes with any sort of success. The trick is to think of your ego as your goofy best friend who lends moral support but doesn’t know shit.”
Safari has this handy feature where you can select a word and right click to bring up a contextual menu, one of whose options is “Search in Google.” Trouble is, you lose whatever page you were browsing to the new Google search.
Well, the engineers at Apple thought of that, and if you have tabbed browsing enabled, just hold down the Command key when selecting this item, and your Google search will happen in a new tab behind the current tab.
“The most boring parts of a property owner’s personality are those which relate to his or her ownership of real estate.”
I’ve been putting together a “Learn how to program Cocoa” program, and one of the things I’ve recently struggled with is how to link up an NSComboBox with a Core Data entity so that a heretofore unseen entry in the text box part of the combo box adds an instance of the entity and sets the value of the combo box to the new entity instance.
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”Yes, it does seem like a flop in the making, what with all the people wondering just how early they need to get in line to buy one on the first day they’re available.”
This is how I spend so much of my life it’s not even funny.
In the style of Merlin Mann’s 5ives, I present you with: Five excellent names for musical acts that (I) don’t (think) exist:
- Canadarm
- Charismatic Megafauna
- sudo
- Awkward Turtle
- The Housecats
“I happen to be an apostle of the proposition that when people pay the real cost of their behavior, we shouldn’t care what behavior they exhibit.”
—Berkeley Public Policy professor Michael O’Hare on transit versus driving.
And curiously enough, taking rejection less personally may help you to get rejected less often. If you think someone judging you will work hard to judge you correctly, you can afford to be passive. But the more you realize that most judgements are greatly influenced by random, extraneous factors—that most people judging you are more like a fickle novel buyer than a wise and perceptive magistrate—the more you realize you can do things to influence the outcome.
From Two Kinds of Judgement. One of the things in life that it took me far too long to learn is that people will totally judge you on shit that shouldn’t matter. To argue that first impressions don’t really matter is to ignore the fact that in most situations they determine whether you’re granted the opportunity to make a second impression.
Of course it’s completely unfair, but trying to condemn reality for its moral failings is a losing game.
