Logging Robby Abaya

This couldn’t have come at a better time for me.

http://inessential.com/?comments=1&postid=3564

Along those same lines, here’s an excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell’s new book about success.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/15/malcolm-gladwell-outliers-extract

http://media.fxguide.com/fxguidetv/fxguidetv-ep040.mov

Here’s a nice interview with John Knoll from ILM about his start in the industry and how his hobbies grew into something more.

I finally got around to starting to learn Objective-C so that I can start playing with my iPhone as a developer. I don’t even know what kind of app I want to make, but the thought of being able to write something using any of the different inputs; the accelerometer, internet, multi-touch, GPS, camera, etc. for some reason excites me. I guess I’m just geeky like that.

Anyhow, I finally got one running on my phone. It wasn’t completely painless, but I was trying to do so many new things at once that I knew the gaping holes in my knowledge would surely prevent it from being “easy”. It wasn’t _that_ bad though, I’ve definitely been through worse.

Here are a few things that I learned along the way (these will make no sense to anybody, but I’m listing them here in case I forget):

- Make sure to set up the “Bundle Identifier” in Info.plist. This should be your application ID.

- Make sure to also set up your “Code Signing” fields in both your Project and Target Build Settings.

- Any drawing should happen in your - (void)drawRect:(CGRect)rect method, which you can’t call directly. You have to call setNeedsDisplayInRect:rect in order to have Cocoa call it.

- The debugger console is your friend.

This exercise was a race to get something onto my iPhone quickly. I still have a huge amount to learn, but I am excited, very excited.

Why cacheAsBitmap is bad [ by Thibault Imbert ]

Good to know.

Today, Sherwin tells me the story about how the hard drive in his laptop failed. Luckily, he was pretty good about backing stuff up so he didn’t lose a whole lot. It still scared me though, and got me thinking. For one thing, he doesn’t really bring his laptop everywhere, it’s his personal computer and mostly stays home. My laptop is now my _only_ computer. It’s almost always with me. It gets bumped around in my bag during my morning commute on Muni, worked on all day long at work, bounces around on my back for my 1.5 mile speed walk to the gym, crammed into a locker at the gym, bounces around for the trek up the hill back home, and finally, worked on for the rest of the night. Even after all that, I leave it on all night because I use it as my alarm clock. Basically, it’s either in use or in transit. My hard drive is at far greater risk than Sherwin’s was, and his failed. At work, we have SVN set up, and I love it. It makes me feel safe. Not only are my files safely backed up somewhere in the cloud, but I also have a version control system that I can count on. For my personal files however, I was pretty much doing things old school. I’m probably better at backing stuff up and version controlling than most people, but nowhere near where I need to be given some of the mission critical things I have going on. So, I bit the bullet and tried to figure out how I can set up an SVN system for myself. Luckily, my MediaTemple GridServer allows me to set up an SVN repository on my site. In fact, their knowledge base articles on setting up SVN are pretty straightforward for the initial part of it. After following the directions though, it still didn’t work with svnX. Some googling turned up an article, “Subversion on Mediatemple” by Mitchell Hashimoto, which explains the need for an ssh key. I know a little about those keys, and I’ve used them before, but I would never have thought that to be the solution to why it wasn’t working for me. I followed his steps (and re-learned how to set up those keys), and now I’m svn-ing like a champ. Thanks Sherwin for reminding me of the need to keep things safe, and Mitch for sharing your experience and helping me in my hour of need!

http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/the-iphone-development-story.html

Twin Peaks San Francisco Sunrise from Chad Richard on Vimeo.

Awesome HDR Timelapse!

Tap Tap Tap - The Design Session

Nice post about their virtual collaborative process.

Mike Relm directed this really dope video.

Tweening and Object Pools

Nice insight into a technique I look forward to using!