Up next, bird flu

I'm amazed by my own body. I've got a cold right now, and my body is converting bottled water into mucus at a 100% efficiency rate. Astounding!

Plus it tastes better than a Krispy Kreme burger

Tim Bray:

My goodness gracious: I thought that America had seized world leadership in the art and science of coating the insides of your arteries with fatty, greasy, substances; but I see that the Italians are still the masters.

Help me learn Cocoa/Obj-C, vol. 1

So I did the Challenge problem in Chapter 4 of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, Second Edition. I've come up with two different "solutions".

Solution 1: "Screw retain counts"

- (IBAction) reportCharacterCount: (id)sender
{
	NSString *inputString = [inputField stringValue];
	[outputField setStringValue:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@ has %d letters.",
		inputString,[inputString length]]];
}

Solution 2: "I'm a good boy"

- (IBAction) reportCharacterCount: (id)sender
{
	NSString *inputString = [[NSString alloc] initWithString:[inputField stringValue]];
	[outputField setStringValue:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@ has %d letters.",
		inputString,[inputString length]]];
	[inputString release];
}

(As you can probably guess, my very first solution consisted of version 1 with a release, which brought me to the debugger in a hurry.)

UPDATE: The magically Delicious Wil Shipley answered my question. Thanks Wil! (And I promise those blank lines aren't there in my actual source code file.)

UPDATE 2: The ever-helpful Jussi Hagman linked me to this article.

Um... I got wasted?

If a hot bartender asks you what you did for St. Patrick's Day, don't tell her "I went to the symphony." While that may be factually accurate, it will not provoke further conversation.

The Half-Blood Prince

Cue the Hallelujah Chorus! I'm officially stylish!

"It's a sign of the times," Mr. Martin said. "People are into beards right now."

"It's a nice masculine aesthetic," said Robert Tagliapietra, who with his similarly bearded partner, Jeffrey Costello, designs a collection of pretty silk jersey dresses under the Costello Tagliapietra label. "We both like that aesthetic of New England cabins with antlers on the wall, plaid shirts and a beard."

In related news, today my boss told me that behind my back, people refer to me as "Harry Potter". To which I have two responses:

1. At least they're not calling me "douchebag".
2. I don't even look like Harry Potter! The resemblance ends with the thick-rimmed glasses!

So much easier

I link to the following humor piece with this observation:

There are two levels of humor here. One will be apparent to anyone who's ever had a new API inflicted on them. The second level of humor is apparent to anyone who's tried to get data binding working under ADO.NET.

Inky!

Pharyngula links to a member of the creationist group Answers In Genesis who makes the following Biblical argument:

...So, animals that contain hemoglobin (vertebrates) and therefore have red blood can be considered "living" and animals that contain hemocyanin, or other proteins (invertebrates) and therefore have blue (pink/violet or brown) blood can be considered "nonliving"... So the logical conclusion can be made that a "living" creature is one that contains red blood.

What I'd really love to see now, though, is the rhetorical squirming they'd go through when it's pointed out that human embryos do not develop red blood cells until about the 5th week of development, and therefore the early embryo, by their own definition, is not living. Heh.

It'll always be Pie to me

Tim Bray has a good blog post about the advantages of Atom over RSS. You may notice that I've removed the link to my RSS feed, and now only have an Atom button.

The walrus was Paul

The latest installment of the TMBG podcast (episode 5A) has a neat little thread with a "meta" theme. Starting at time index 3:09:

• Savoy Truffle. TMBG covering a Beatles song that refers to another Beatles song, "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da".
• (She Was A) Hotel Detective In The Future. TMBG playing a new song that refers to an old TMBG song, "(She Was A) Hotel Detective"
• Commentary track for (She Was A) Hotel Detective In The Future. TMBG, pretending to be other people, commenting on a song which refers to another TMBG song.

Random Mac stuff Sunday

A couple of neat links for you:

• BBEdit Gems: I can almost guarantee you'll say "I didn't know you could do that!" at least once.
• Cocoa Text System: Likewise. Full of tons of really dirty hacks to Mac OS X.
• Win XP and OS X dual boot on MacBook Pro: The hack that sold a million computers. This will be even more impressive once they find a driver that talks to the ATI video chip.

HTTP GET it and forget it

The Amazon S3 web service I mentioned yesterday has me excited.

One of the first ideas to pop into my head was backup. You could stick gigabytes of important files on there for long-term storage, and not pay much at all. (I'd use encryption first, of course.)

The only real obstacle to this idea is the pitiful broadband speeds here in the United States.

Fuckwad, I say!

In the same vein, Dave Winer likes to announce the fact that he makes "shitty software, with bugs."

Combine that with his recent admission that he is not a Mac developer (even though he seems to use a Mac as his primary machine), and you wonder if he shouldn't change his mantra to "shitty ideas, with legal threats".

(His admission about not being a Mac developer is easier to understand when you realize his site's at scripting.com, not programming.com.)

Dave Winer is a narcissistic, greedy fuckwad

Via Kottke, I see that Rogers Cadenhead posted part of a letter he received from Dave Winer's lawyer.

It makes me even more eager for the day when Winer finally shuts his big yap.

Big bytes

Today Amazon launched a web service called S3.

The first thing that comes to mind is schweeeeet.

Day or night

The world of never-ending happiness. You can always see the sun.

[Sniff]

Conceivably, there are some people who choose to work at a chocolate factory or a florist because they like being around those particular smells.

Does anybody ever decide to work at an automobile factory for the same reason?

To your limited perception

The dorkiest of the geeks like to argue about Foo Camp and Bar Camp.

The important question is, when will there be a Fafcamp?

Sex can wait, masturbate!

Andrew Sullivan invented the Yglesias Award, so I suppose it's only fair to nominate Andrew himself for this observation:

Specter has a Q and A about the article here. These people would rather people die of AIDS and cancer than do anything to "encourage" sexuality. And they have the cojones to call the Democrats the "party of death."

Ah... epiphany

Be careful, M.C. Barsenas! Don't study too hard!

Without the jiggles, of course

A recipe I learned last night: Southern Comfort + Apple Pucker + cranberry juice = a concoction that tastes exactly like red Jell-O.

You aren't dumb and impatient, are you, dummy?

Dave Winer says of his brand-new baby,

OPML 2.0 is easy to understand if you're intelligent, have common sense and are patient.