corprewland

note that the latest revision of this blog’s theme seems to have introduced a weird bug with the code layout plugin (wp-syntax) on some browsers. i’m looking into it.

I think the single most useful thing I’ve figured out recently in programming for MacOSX and the iPhone is this little snippet right here.

- (void) updateListForEntityNamed:(NSString*) entityName andSearchString:(NSString*) queryString
{
[...]
 
	MyDocument* current = [[NSDocumentController sharedDocumentController] currentDocument];
	if(current && current != self)
	{
		NSLog(@"CurrentDocument:%@ != self:%@", current, self);
		[current updateListForEntityNamed: entityName andSearchString: queryString];
		return;
	}
[...]
}

What this does is intercept incoming messages that are supposed to go to the current window, and redirect them to that instance. I’ve run into issues in Leopard (MacOSX 10.5) where this is an issue. To some extent, this is probably a misconfiguration in interface builder somewhere, but it also an issue when using CoreData, because the ManagedObjectContexts are particular to instances of NSManagedDocument, and there are issues that arise if you end up using the wrong context.

I am slowly becoming a great fan of CoreData, it’s a great persistence/object-graph-management layer. More on this later.

i greatly prefer the spelling ‘busses’ to ‘buses’ although either spelling is correct.

Noted flaneur Tom Dobrowolsky of Urban Archives and Seattlest (and a friend of mine from grad school) wrote a poem about riding by me on the bus the other day, and I have saved it here for posterity.

I saw Corprew today
outside the window of my bus.
He was standing at the corner
stuffing a laptop or something like that
into his compact bag.                                       5
He looked intent.

This is my favorite non-ovary related poem written on, by, or about mass transit in Seattle.

It IS a fine morning. I was coming from a consulting gig I currently have going with folks whose offices are in the University District, and I’d just bought a plastic hardshell for my MacBook Pro.

Tom Dobrowolsky of Urban Archives and Seattlest wrote a poem about encountering me on the bus the other day. I thought it was pretty awesome, so I’m saving it here.

Metro route 44, 11:53 to 11:54AM

I saw Corprew today
outside the window of my bus.
He was standing at the corner
stuffing a laptop or something like that
into his compact bag.                                       5
He looked intent.

I thought for a second that he might get on my bus
but it pulled away
without him aboard.                                        10
I would have liked to say hello
and inquire what he was doing.
I wondered why he was on campus;
I wondered where he was going.
Had he eaten yet?                                          15

Corprew's a mysterious guy
with his fingers in many pies.
Nobody really knows when Corprew comes and goes.
He moves as he pleases.                                    20

As for me, quite ironically,
I got off at the next stop
barely in time for class.
No time to talk to friends;                                25
a slave to the watch upon my hand.
Unaware of Corprew's latest crimes.

© Tom Dobrowlowsky.

Tidbits, the apple weekly newsletter, missed the joke in their review of Apple Aperture 2.0.1.

In your review of Aperture 2.0.1, you note:

(Incidentally, the two videos on that page use Apple’s Victoria text-to-speech voice for the narration instead of a human voiceover, a practice I’ve not noticed before. It took a few seconds to pick out what was “wrong” – the occasional clipped words and odd pronunciations that indicated an artificial voice.)

This is a reference to the computer game Portal, the main antagonist in that game is a computer named GlaDOS, who has a voice somewhat similar to the victoria voice and that’s also the reason that there are some grammatical irregularities in the dialogue as well. (“Aperture [Noun]“, which is said several times alludes to how the computer in that game says “Aperture Science,” the name of the company.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TluRVBhmf8w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0PDGp1hL4w

Thanks,

–Corprew

Not relevant to anything in particular, but funny.

This last week was the InfoCamp 2008 kick off meeting. After a successful 2007 event, we’ve decided to do it again and to expand it further. This year we have Aaron, Kristen, Andy, Rachel and myself back again, and we’re also joined by Genevieve, a librarian from PLU, and Joshua, a student at the UW Information School.

Aaron and Kristen graciously cooked food for the lot of us, and we had a great initial planning meeting in which we identified roles and people responsible for roles, and then talked for a bit about the future of the ASIS&T PNW. I’m very much looking forward to doing another InfoCamp with this team, it should be a lot of fun.

We’re looking to have a much easier time this year since we have the experience of doing the conference last year, and are also starting much earlier in the year with our planning. It will continue to be an unconference serving (primarily) the PNW Information Science community.

InfoCamp is a barcamp-style conference focused on Information Science for the Pacific Northwest. The second InfoCamp will be held in the fall of 2008 at Youngstown Cultural Arts Center in Seattle, WA. This is the same venue as the first.

InfoCamp is run by the Pacific Northwest Chapter of ASIS&T, in conjunction with the student chapter of ASIS&T from the University of Washington. I’m currently the Secretary/Treasurer of the PNW chapter.

gloriously, i upgraded to the latest version of wordpress today, and the upgrade ate all my tags. that fails to be awesome in real ways, but i remain generally happy with wordpress.