bithead redux

• @JimTomlinson yeah, but the upass sure beats full bus fare. #
• @SenorDanimal it was fantastic, and I made sure to see your name in the credits! (I’m a credit watcher anyway - never know what you’ll see!) #

• @senordanimal saw your name in the credits. Great movie. #

• see, the truth is that the more I know about floating point numbers, the less confidence I have in them. #

• it’s beta 8 it’s beta 8 isn’t it great it’s beta 8 #

• slowly but surely digging evernote like I thought I would. I may end up retiring yojimbo as a result. #
• I am capable programmer man today. Nothing shall defeat. wait. shit. #
• revoke my certificate? you are going to revoke my certificate??? how dare you! #
• I’m talking with a .NET programmer about ObjC and Cocoa. Trying to compare VS and Xcode; C# and ObjC. Assemblies vs. Framworks and Headers. #

This is a scattered post. I apologize.

In the job I had before this one, I was doing .NET programming.

Now, don’t cringe immediately. I did it for several reasons; my mortgage being a big one, of course. I did it because I wanted to see what it was all about. I was curious about the state of the art for Windows programming tools, and also because I wanted to see what Microsoft had done with C#, since I had never really had the reason or inclination to look at it.

My conclusion? C# is a lot like Java, but it is very much like a Microsoft-designed Java. There was a reason for everything they did, and I think a lot of it actually does improve on the Java stuff, but much of it was just different. One of the things that I used in C# that was new to me was Properties — variables that call the right methods for getting and setting values.

My initial reaction to Properties was that I didn’t like the hidden code. It wasn’t always clear to me that doing an assignment was actually calling code — which is one of my complaints with C++ ad operator overloading in general — it is, at times, hard to see from just looking at the code what is being called.

That being said, and at the risk of repeating myself, I find myself falling in love with Objective-C (ObjC). ObjC cannot be described as a clean language, its basic nature is that it exists as a hybrid language. In addition, the 2.0 version of ObjC includes the same Properties that I have issues with in C#. Yet they don’t annoy me as much as they did in C#, mainly because in the most common case, they are used to make instance variables behave in a safer fashion.

Tech Digression: The most common use of Properties within ObjC is to make your instance variables thread-safe and memory-management friendly. Most of the time you are going to declare your property and let the system write the code for you. My issue with C# was that much of the time, interesting code with side effects was being shoved into the getters and setters. In the vast majority of the cases in ObjC, a property is used to just safely access an instance variable. Yeah, there could be some complex stuff going on, but it is usually centered around access serialization, and making sure that the right thing is done memory-management-wise.

ObjC can be intimidating, with all of the #import, @implementation, [object method], and other stuff that doesn’t look like C… It’s definitely something built by a mad computer scientist.

But I’m falling deeply in love with it. I’m not sure why.

So, if you check out the Ars Technica page about their joint party with Gizmodo, you’ll notice a big guy with his mouth open pretty much dominating the foreground in the first picture (the crowd picture).

That’s me.

Yeah, I wish my mouth wasn’t open, and I wish I was another 40 pounds lighter, but damn, I’m in Ars.

I thought I should clarify some things.

Programs and operating systems that run on small mobile devices do have differing requirements from the same sorts of things on a desktop or server class machine. This is certainly true.

Mobile devices require a UI that deals with smaller screens. Since many of these mobile devices are communication devices, there is a need for more real-time code to handle the traffic.

My main point is that as mobile devices become more powerful, they become able to build on a base that didn’t necessarily have to originate on a mobile device. With OSX, Apple is able to adapt the UI classes to be appropriate for a mobile device, and as far as I can tell, most of the tweaky real-time stuff is being done in a segregated part of the device (every time I’ve updated the software, it’s been in two stages — first the OS, and then “baseband,” I assume (caveat reader) that the baseband stuff is the radio firmware, where the real tweaky-ass stuff needs to be).

I’ve come to this conclusion because of my time spent developing on the iPhone, as well as time I’ve spent developing for other devices. On the iPhone, most of your program is written just like pretty much any mac application program. On other devices, there’s a whole different structure that has to be learned, because maybe the network works differently, or they’ve invented a different way to do the event loop, etc.

It’s safe to make the bet that mobile devices five years or so from now will have the same computational and storage capabilities of todays average desktop machine. The danger is that if you don’t make that bet, you will be passed over by those that do make that bet. If I’ve learned anything in the past 25 years or so, it’s that technology always amazes me. My personal hope is that I am wrong, and that mobile devices 5 years hence will kick the ass of today’s average desktop machine.

• there should be a name for playing with your [redacted] app for purposes other than testing. appsturbation? #
• oh, god of hard drives, why do you hate me so? is it because I am backed up? am I tempting fate by having a plan? #
• @HeroicAutobot I find that I can get mine to work again if I abuse it — blow on it, roll it while pressing hard, that sort of thing. #
• @HeroicAutobot they really are finicky. #
• @HeroicAutobot I am pleased to have provided you with a rich vein of entendres to mine. #
• @bilm one that I knew was going to bite it. It was the one that started this whole saga about 1.5 months ago. #
• it is frustrating to work on code (not mine) that causes so many warnings when compiled. I start to get all twitchy. #
• and now, it’s time for a haircut. #
• alas, poor @erikbmi, we knew him well. #

…yeah, I turned off the posting of my twitter traffic to my blog.

You may all commence rejoicing, the noise has quieted down.