March 2002 Archives

Objective C isn't that hard either. The syntax really throws you for a few hours, but as soon as you start coding, it makes sense.

There's a lot of dragging and dropping when building a UI in Interface Builder, but you're really not doing all that much. Just setting the instance methods in the class (this button instance variable points to this button on the screen, called outlets) and telling the button which method to call in the class (actions). Give it a couple of days, no problem.

Like Java, the power (and the time it takes) comes in learning the class library.

In the third trimester of a woman's pregnancy, hormones surge and women get the nesting instinct -- they know the baby is on the way and must get the house in order. Need to buy baby clothes, paint the baby room, clean the house, etc. Hormones make swiss cheese of the brain and god help the man who stands in her way. Any small thing can set her off... my wife almost left me during her first pregnancy when I wouldn't drive the old bed in the guest room over to Goodwill at 10:30pm one evening. She was better the next day.

6 ¹/₂ months through her second, she's nesting again. The hormones must of gotten to me too, because I'm nerding. Nerding causes men to go out and buy expensive electronics equipment because they know they're not going to have $$money$$ or time to use the new toys soon. Today's purchases for the iMac:

• 512MB memory card, bringing total to a whopping 768MB. You really have to shop for this -- my usual ChipMerchants want $240 -- luckily I found AppleSolutions who wanted a measly $129.
• iSub -- help iTunes down low, low, low... how low do you go

Actually, I can see other updates (Adam Curry), but not updates from myself. Which means what? Radio I/O must be pinging the external radio site for updates (the opml file itself?), so the whole firewall/nat issue is mute if you are posting to a remote server? Who knows. Brain's too tired to reread and comprehend.

You can read about programming all you want, but until you sit down and code, you won't understand. Back in January, I purchased Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X and read it from cover to cover. But actions, outlets and delegates never stuck. Until now.

Now that I own an iMac and have installed the (included) developer environment, I've made the connection. Nothing like blindly copying code from a text book to your code editor to start understanding. Maybe the act of typing quiets the left brain so the right brain can absorb.

Once I get through Objective-C, and maybe AppleScript, I have to check out the Radio/Frontier scripting language. Just reading about it, I don't understand the "@" and "^" symbols in the langauge. One fun project might be taking local image directories and posting thumbnail pages. Also, I'd love to have some sort of RTF editor for posting ... I miss the Windows DHTML editor...

• natuarl keyboard
• 2 button/wheel optical mouse
• firewire cable
• router
• ethernet cables
• blank cds

Plus, I still need to buy a digital camera (with an extra memory card)...

Luckily, I bought the digital video camera a few years ago

Russ Lipton: How to Create Navigation Links.  [Scripting News]

Timing is everything. When I walked into that Apple Store I Monday, I just had to plop down $1799.

Apple Raises Price of New iMacs. SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) -- Citing an increase in component costs, Apple Computer Inc. has raised the prices of its new iMac computers by $100 each. By The Associated Press. [New York Times: Technology]

I wasn't convinced buying a new iMac was the right thing to do until I made my first iMovie. When I bought the computer, making a video was the last thing on my mind. I was more excited by the whole BSD / Cocoa programming framework (yes, I'm a nerd). It was never something I thought I would or could do, but one hour with some footage of Katherine (now 2 1/2) at the Santa Barbara Zoo convinced me.