Way back in 2005, I bitched about Xcode’s autocomplete because it was always guessing wrong. It was super annoying because it wasn’t just a list of suggestions, it actually filled in the line and moved your cursor, so if you paused for a split second it gave you extra work instead of being a timesaver. Thankfully someone working on the source editor is a little less masochistic and switched it to a visual studio style list of suggestions.

The old asshole must have moved to working on LLDB, because now it has the same broken behavior the Xcode source editor used to have. Pause for a half second to see which account* object you want to inspect, and it “helpfully” fills in the wrong one, every time.

Between this and the awfulness that is OCUnit, it leaves me wondering if anyone at Apple ever uses Xcode to test or debug code, or if they all just use AppCode.

• Guestbook in the App Store
• Guestbook website
• Guestbook on Github

When I started the Guestbook app in 2011, I wrote it as a favor to a friend, and as a learning opportunity. A work friend was getting married and wanted to use her iPad as a Guestbook, but there weren’t any apps in the App Store that fit her needs. I had been playing around with the SDK for a couple years and looking for a project idea I could publish, so I wrote a basic one up real quick. I pushed out a 1.0 in about a month of evening & weekend work, and had all kinds of grandiose plans about where to take it.

Then life happened, as it usually does. Beth was pregnant with our son, and as soon as he was born all hobbies went out the window. I’d much rather spend time with him than writing code anyway, and I got a new job writing iOS applications. Getting paid to do what you like and all that jazz. Thirdly, it isn’t exactly setting the world on fire anyway. At the time I wrote it there wasn’t any competition, but now there are 8 guestbook type applications in the app store, and several are free. I’m going to keep charging a nominal amount for mine in the hopes that it will earn enough to keep paying for my developer license, but anyone who contributes can get a promo code just by asking.

It was a lot of fun to write, and I believe it helped me land my current job (if nothing else than just through the experience). Hopefully someone finds it useful, even if it’s in a what-not-to-do sort of way. I still have the laudry list of things I want to improve, both feature and code quality wise, but this is my acknowledgement that I’m not going to get to it any time soon.

In the year since Sam was born, I’ve had very little time to learn new skills or create things. Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade my time with him for anything in the world, but I do miss the act of making something from nothing, or learning a new thing that makes me better. My job for several years has just been the thing I do to get paid. I’ve learned all there is to learn in my current group, done all there is to do.

In the past, my creative outlet was writing code, building franken-boxes for special purposes like a mythtv machine or a router. These IT nerdery activities all have one thing in common. They require a large chunk of continuous time to dedicate to the task. Writing code is an especially strong example of this. It takes 15 - 20 minutes just to load the whole problem set into my memory (get in the grove), and you don’t get that kind of time to yourself, ever, when you have a small child.

Where does that time go? Mostly care and feeding of the child. They start off with zero skills in this world other than eating, sleeping, and pooping, and it is your job to turn them into a complete human being. Even the eating and sleeping part needs improvement. Sam was a horrible sleeper for much of this first year. Many hours every day were spent rocking him, so even with that free time I was supposed to have while he was asleep, I still didn’t have access to a compiler, or the ability to concentrate.

What I did have access to during these long periods of rocking was my phone. I didn’t think of much to do with it other than twitter/facebook/games though. Even the games I could play one-handed were limited. I stuck to a lot of card games. My scores are way higher than I would ever care to admit. With no creative outlet at work or at home, I’ve felt myself getting very old very fast.

I tried to correct the work situation immediately upon returning earlier this year, but economic and management constraints have pulled me back into my same old role. This lead directly to this new change in my professional life. Hopefully a new job at a new employer doing new things will satisfy that craving to be a better nerd.

The other half of fixing this creative drought is to stop playing games and start writing. Those continuous blocks of rocking I’ve wasted playing card games could have been spent putting ideas into words. I’ve switched blogging platforms so I can write offline, and then edit and publish in the minute here/ minute there computing scenario that is my home life. Conceptually, I like writing as a creative outlet because it doesn’t require the pre-load time or specialized tools that designing and writing code does. I can write a sentence here and there and then try and bring it all together into a cohesive thought later. I’m not completely happy with my new blogging workflow, but thinking about how to improve the process gives me something else to do.

What I don’t want is for this to devolve into a random bitch-about-my-day blog, so I have deleted over 300 of those types of posts from history. They are preserved in a backup, but they will probably never be seen again.

Also, since I do not have time anymore for random IT bullshit (transitioning the blog alone took 3 weeks of here-and-there time), comments are gone. If I write something that you would like to respond to, please do so via mastodon, email, or your own blog.

Yesterday I accepted an offer to advance my career at a new company. I’ll be creating iOS applications for electric coop customers at NISC.

To my friends and coworkers who remain at Boeing, it’s been a pleasure working with you, and I hope we can stay close even without the daily grind holding us together.

To my future coworkers at NISC, I look forward to meeting you, and building some great mobile experiences in the future!

Just got off the phone with Beth since I’m at work today, so the rest of the story is second hand.

Cuivre River showed up around 9 this morning and cut the power, the electrician showed up shortly after. After getting the old meter back off, the Cuivre River guy(s) noticed that the line heading into the house was pretty destroyed (charred, frayed, etc). They decided it was safer to replace almost everything. So now we’ve got a new meter bracket, new meter, and new lines going from the meter to my breaker box. They finished up and left a little after 11am. The electrician didn’t know how much the parts cost, so he’s going to send a bill in the next couple days.

Now we REALLY don’t have to worry about shitty power destroying anything this weekend.

I was sitting in Busch III last night waiting for the game to start when Beth called. The power was out at home. More accurately, it was out in SOME of the house. Not good news. I got home around midnight after the game and started playing with breakers, seeing exactly what worked and what didn’t. Mapped out the breakers, and couldn’t find a pattern for the life of me.

I called in to work around 10am to say I wasn’t coming in (alarm clock one of the things that didn’t work). I called an electrician after that, and sat around till 1:30pm waiting for him to show up. After playing around with a multimeter and my breaker box for a few minutes, he tells me theirs a problem with one of the rails coming into the house. The first rail is at 122.8V, but the second was down to 108V. We headed out back to check the meter.

He popped open the cover and pulled the meter off the house like he’s done this before. He looked at it for a second and said there’s my problem. The electricity comes in from Cuivre River Electric into the box, through a bracket into the meter, and out another bracket into my house and the breaker box inside. One of the brackets holding the meter in place has worn loose and there is evidence of arcing, and some melted plastic. The bracket must be replaced.

He called Cuivre River, and they will be out between 9-10am tomorrow morning to shut off the power to my house at their green box so that he can replace the bracket. It should only take 5 minutes to do, but it’s too dangerous to try it in the cramped quarters of my meter box, in the rain. I think I’m going to work tomorrow, but Beth can handle supervising the installation and paying the man for fixing our power. The good news is that we don’t have to worry about shitty power ruining anyones expensive electronics at the Halloween party this weekend.

St. Louis has the following DTV OTA channels that come in perfectly clear in LSL:

• 2-1 KTVIDT
• 4-1 KMOV
• 5-1 KSDK-DT
• 5-2 KSDK-WX
• 9-1 KETC HD
• 9-2 KETCKid
• 9-3 KETC 9
• 9-4 KETCDIY
• 11-1 WB11-DT
• 11-2 WB11-D2
• 30-1 KDNL-DT

Unfortunately non of them are broadcasting above 480p right now. I guess I’ll have to wait until this evening for some HD goodness.

BTW: If you’ve got a choice between the WD-Y57 and the WD-Y57732, go with the Y57. The only things the Y57732 adds (besides $$$) is a 7-in-1 card reader and 3 composite imputs instead of 2.

Well, I’ve spent a few months running 64bit slackware and WinXP 64, and I have to say that neither OS is production ready. The basic functions of each OS work, mostly, but backward compatibility and third party software support are both less than stellar.

Windows

• Services for Unix (SFU) has not been, and will not be, ported to XP64.
• x86-64 programs are put in C:\Program Files, and 32bit programs are put in C:\Program Files (x86). Many old windows programs (including the steam installer) can’t handle parenthesis in a path.
• NVidia’s windows x86-64 driver installer doesn’t support my gf4 ti4600, although modifying the .inf file allows it to install and run fine.
• Useful things like Daemon Tools don’t work because of driver format changes.
• A bunch of little things I don’t remember right now

Linux

• /usr/lib and /usr/lib64 confuse some programs<
• Some poorly written software (like mplayer) assume 32bit pointers
• Shell script game installers blow up very, very badly. So badly, in fact, that I’ve been unable to run any of my native games (Q3, UT, UT2k3, etc)

Since all the things I really care to use Spaceheater for don’t work or work poorly, I think I’m going to go back to real Slackware, and 32bit Win2k or XP. Thankfully AMD did a great job with their x86-64 design and implementation, so I shouldn’t notice any type of a performance hit, and I don’t have 4GB of memory to worry about using anyway.

Unless you’ve got a need for 4GB+ of RAM and can’t use a better architecture, then stick to 32bit OSes and give the 64bit stuff a few more years to gel. That recommendation doesn’t apply to hardware of course. AMD’s 90nm Venice core can run in 32bit mode just fine, has SSE3 support, and runs at room temp with a slow, quiet fan. Plus you’ll be ready for when the software finally IS ready to run in 64bit mode.

Maybe it’s time I step away from the computer? Either that or the test is fairly lame.

Called shittytel customer service.

Explained my story to Yet Another Person, who sounded like he was writing the whole thing down. He said he’d put another order into the DSL group and it should be working by 5pm tonight. He also said he’d credit my account $25 for putting up with this bullshit. We’ll see if either happens.

Update: 5pm came and went, and still no DSL. By the time I got around to calling them up AGAIN, customer service was closed. Gotta wait till monday now.