December 2009 Archives

One of my gifts to my wife, Nancy, for her birthday this year was the Happy Birthday song, chiptune style. It’s an actual NES program, hand-coded in 6502 assembly. This is the first original NES program I’ve written, and could be considered my first homebrew or even demo. While you can download the ROM and run it yourself, here’s a video of it running in Nestopia, an NES emulator [YouTube link]:

Some interesting stats about this program:

Authenticated Mercurial repositories are generally handled in one of two ways: HTTP authentication or SSH. Prior to Mercurial version 1.3, the best way to handle authenticated repositories so that you didn’t have to enter your password on every transaction was to use SSH with ssh-agent, or, if you were running Mac OS X, use Jonathan Wight’s hgkeychain extension, which stored HTTP passwords in the Mac OS X keychain. As of Mercurial 1.3, there’s a new way to handle authenticated HTTP repositories that I’ve just started using.

For those that missed the announcement, NSConference 2010 is now open for registration. NSConference is a 2-day conference for Mac and iPhone developers, plus some optional workshops. If you missed WWDC or C4, or just can’t get enough good technical information related to all things Mac and iPhone, check out NSConference. There’s one in Europe and the US, so there’s no excuse for not going! Yours truly will be giving a talk on writing clean code.

Bottom bars have been an important user interface element for a while now on Mac OS X. They’re that gray status bar you see at the bottom of many of Apple’s applications including iTunes, Finder, iChat, iCal, Address Book, and iPhoto. The Human Interface Guidelines even has a whole section on bottom bars describing what they are and when to use them. In case you’re not familiar with what they look like, here’s a fresh window with a bottom bar:

In Mac OS X 10.5, Apple added a new API to NSWindow to add bottom bars, somewhat cryptically named setContentBorderThickness:forEdge:. There was no support for bottom bars in Interface Builder 3.0 and 3.1, though, so you had to call this method in awakeFromNib:

[window setContentBorderThickness:22 forEdge:NSMinYEdge];

In Snow Leopard, we finally get Interface Builder support for bottom bars. I somehow missed this in the new IB until just this week, and it’s easy to use.

This blog currently runs on Movable Type, and has since I started it back in 2003 on version 2.65 (dang, my first post is quite a snoozer). I even wrote some plugins for version 2 and 3 to cope with some of the limitations of its permalinks.

However, I recently learned that version 5 will only supports MySQL. This is a huge disappointment as SQLite is one of the major reasons I chose Movable Type (see my comments about upgrading to MT 4). I don’t know what’s motivating this decision, but it really makes no sense. Is it really that hard to write database neutral SQL? Surely this is a solved problem by now.

This is so bad that it’s deal killer for me, and I’m starting to investigate my options going forward.