http://www.codingadventures.com Captain's log Wed, 09 Jul 2008 04:28:49 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en These days, I get quite a few questions from my fellow co-workers about resources to start with Cocoa development. So here's a quick list of books that I absolutely recommend: Objective C in general: Programming ObjectiveC Intro to Cocoa: Learning Cocoa with ObjectiveC Getting your feet wet on the iPhone: iPhone Open Application ... http://www.codingadventures.com/2008/07/learning-cocoa-book-recommendations/ I've been recently playing a little bit with GLSL/Core Image shaders. One of the earliest limitations I ran into was the fact that you cannot have conditional results. In other word, if you do an if/else test, the output of your shader cannot depend on it. (Not entirely sure why ... http://www.codingadventures.com/2008/06/threshold-filter-in-glsl/ RubyCocoa is one of the most fascinating tools on OSX. It makes it more than easy to rapidly prototype and try ideas with Cocoa. But unfortunately, out of the box, a RubyCocoa project seems to require an Objective-C shell to start it up. That means firing up XCode for every ... http://www.codingadventures.com/2008/06/standalone-rubycocoa-applications/ If you're developing on Windows, chances are you are using VS.NET. And if you're using VS.NET, you'll probably feel like the thing could go much faster. Well, it turns out it can - I spent a weekend researching how to do that, so here are the results for the startup ... http://www.codingadventures.com/2008/05/speeding-up-vsnet-startup-times/ Here's the statement in question: Vec3 v = (2,3,0) After running it, v is set to (0,0,0) - can you spot why? In case you couldn't, here's what happens. C++ encounters (0,3,0) and evaluates to 0 - because comma-separated expressions evaluate left-to-right and return the rightmost expression. That's strike one right there - ... http://www.codingadventures.com/2008/04/reason-947-why-c-is-dangerous-and-certainly-not-type-safe/ I recently decided to get involved in Aaron Swartz's latest project, watchdog.net. And since one of the most interesting jobs to me was investigating an alternative to Google Maps, I took the plunge and tried to look at Mapnik. First challenge - just getting it to build on OSX. It seems ... http://www.codingadventures.com/2008/04/howto-building-mapnik-on-osx-leopard/ Bowing to the shell history meme: history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf "%5d\t%s \n",a[i],i}}'|sort -rn|head 55 sudo 45 ls 42 git 32 cd 25 gem 23 vi 21 ruby 15 man 13 echo 7 /bin/rm Heh. Turns out most of my work ... http://www.codingadventures.com/2008/04/my-personal-history/ I have recently started exploring DVCS - distributed version control systems. The power they offer you as a developer is amazing, especially if you use them with a patch management solution like quilt. The ability to juggle branches and patches with almost zero cost is extremely empowering. (At the same time, ... http://www.codingadventures.com/2008/04/the-sad-state-of-dvcs-for-windows/ During my work adventures, I have the 'fortune' of working with Windows threads. One thing that's nice to have is a name for each thread so you can actually tell them apart. Turns out, there is no easy call to set a thread name. However, there is an officially approved way ... http://www.codingadventures.com/2008/04/youve-got-to-be-kidding-me/ This is one of the wonderful detours programming takes me on from time to time. What I really wanted to do is work a little bit more on my neural network code. Next up was a back-propagation algorithm for learning. There are plenty of examples of it, but few that ... http://www.codingadventures.com/2008/04/ruby-osx-and-opengl/