December 2011
1 post
Krzysztof Kieślowski on Crafting an Experience
I recently re-watched the Three Colors trilogy by the late Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski (1941-1996). I first watched the three films when I was in college. I think I understood more and saw more in the films than I did when I was younger. Growing up, having traveled, and some knowledge of the history and one of the languages spoken in the film (French) all helped. But even back then I was...
November 2011
2 posts
Cirque du Soleil and Radio Canada International
In the mid-1990s I owned a shortwave radio. It was one of the top-tier models made by Sangean, although I forgot the model number. That was before Internet radio came along, and you could still write to shortwave radio stations, with an attached international reply coupon, to request for their schedule and publications. So I wrote to Radio Canada International (RCI) to ask for their schedule and a...
Permanently Convert WordPress Blogs to Static...
Since I started using Tumblr to host my blogs, I no longer used WordPress. It’s a great blog software, but even if you stopped writing blogs with it, you still need to run its software update from time to time for security. Because of that, plus other various personal reasons, I decided to convert all the WordPress blogs that I hosted on my own to static pages.
After some research online,...
October 2011
3 posts
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, at the company memorial of Steve Jobs:
But there is one more thing he leaves us. He leaves us with each other. Because without him, Apple would have died in the late-90s, and the vast majority of us would have never met.
The works of Apple have touched and will continue to touch many people’s lives. They have certainly touched, and changed, mine. I gave up on...
Flickr OAuth Support in ObjectiveFlickr
I’ve added Flickr OAuth support to ObjectiveFlickr over the weekend.
Flickr announced in June that they started requiring new apps to use the OAuth-based authentication process, and the previous authentication process was deprecated and will be eventually phased out in early 2012. I recommend developers who use ObjectiveFlickr check out the latest version to start the transition.
...
The Low-Hanging Fruits and Bumpy Ride into the...
I bought Tyler Cowen’s book “The Great Stagnation” and finished it the same evening. I enjoyed it much like I did from reading books like “Day of Empire”, in that they shed light on understanding the world we live in and where we are going from that. Cowen’s book is entirely about the situation in the US, but much of his analysis should apply to many other...
June 2011
1 post
Using OS X's Built-in ICU Library in Your Own...
Unicode string is usually not difficult to handle1. The tricky part comes when you need to have knowledge of Unicode on things like:
Turning strings like “Café” to upper case or lower case (the toupper() or tolower() in Standard C Library won’t work)
Stripping all punctuation symbols. This is not as easy as it seems. How do you also strip various European quotation marks as...
April 2011
1 post
Brad Cox's "Object-Oriented Programming" (1986)
A few weeks ago I had a chance to re-read this particular book by Brad Cox1. It is also the first book that introduced the Objective-C language to the world.
It’s not a heavy book — at 274 pages including index, Cox has outlined his solution for the software reusability problem in a succinct language (yes, pun intended). The book spends the first two chapters on why reusability is...
March 2011
1 post
BugzKit, a FogBugz API Library for Objective-C
BugzKit, a FogBugz API Library for Objective-C
BugzKit is a FogBugz API library for Objective-C. I started developing BugzKit in mid-2009 at Lithoglyph as the foundation for LadyBugz, a FogBugz client for the Mac. Since the company has discontinued the development of the app, I think it’s time to release the library to the public as an open source project. I hope that by opening the...
February 2011
1 post
The Hybrid Drive Upgrade
I replaced the old hard disk drive in my laptop as it showed signs of dying two weeks ago. There is a lot of talk about upgrading to SSD among the people I follow on Twitter. SSD is great, no doubt, but it’s still an expensive option.
Then I came upon this: a hybrid drive. It’s actually a traditional, spinning hard disk drive with 4 GB flash memory used as read cache.
...
November 2010
1 post
“The storytelling that thrives for a long time in the milieu of work — the
rural,...”
– Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” (1936). English translation from the book “Illuminations”, New York, NY: Schocken, 1969.
October 2010
5 posts
People Who Don't Boast Their Working on Making the...
I don’t have the DVD with me now, but in one of the bonus scenes of the film Helvetica, Erik Spiekermann, a German design titan, talks about how his satisfaction comes from the fact that he designed the signage of train stations that people rely on and pass by everyday without realizing the design was his work.
It’s an interesting way of seeing things that I find, again and again, in...
LEMON and That parse.y File in SQLite Source
I had really only took a cursory glimpse of SQLite’s source, and I had always thought the parse.y file was a yacc/Bison parser source. I was wrong: It’s the parser source for LEMON, the parser generator written by SQLite’s author, D. Richard Hipp.
According to its web page:
The parser generated by Lemon is both re-entrant and thread-safe.
Lemon includes the concept of a...
[A-Za-z0-9\s\n\.,]-Only Programming Language?
Someone must have already said this somewhere.
I did more note-taking, email and document drafting these days on my iPad. Most types of text I can do it fine on iPad’s on-screen keyboard, except one thing: code snippets. C and C-like languages use tons of symbol characters that often hide two level down on iPad’s keyboard, and it’s horrible if you need to write just a simply...
And I still read essays sometimes
“Change or Perish” by Roger Cohen, via Lexington:
Before leggings, when there were letters, before texts and tweets, when there was time, before speed cameras, when you could speed, before graffiti management companies, when cities had souls, we managed just the same.
Before homogenization, when there was mystery, before aggregation, when the original had value, before...
Follow-Up on Objective-C Cyclic Retention in...
I’ve written on a pitfall of Objective-C blocks. Blocks implicitly retain the objects referenced inside them, and that can cause all kinds of problems.
Mark Dalrymple has written on the same topic, and his emphasis is on using self. He came up with a “lighter” solution without resorting to an NSValue object: Use the __block storage class.
Read his blog entry in full to...
August 2010
3 posts
Lithoglyphics: LadyBugz 1.6.9: More Bug Fixes →
We’ve just released LadyBugz 1.6.9. It turns out that 1.6.7 didn’t completely fix the crashing bugs, and from the crash reports we’ve received (thanks everyone for letting us know!), it concentrated in one specific area. We’ve revamped that part of the code, and version 1.6.9 should clear that issue now.
Another Mile to Go in the GC-back-to-NonGC... →
From Lithoglyphics, the blog of my company:
We have just released LadyBugz 1.6.6, available from our website and through auto update.
After we released LadyBugz 1.6.1, we have received a number of bug reports that it crashed at various places. We realized that our garbage collection transition was not completely done, and there were loose ends that we overlooked. We take those issues...
Cyclic Retention Pitfall in Objective-C Blocks
Is it tempting to write the following code:
NSBlockOperation *op = [[[NSBlockOperation alloc] init] autorelease];
[op addExecutionBlock:^(void) {
if (![op isCancelled]) {
// run the block if the operation is not cancelled
}
}];
[someOperationQueue addOperation:op];
If you don’t use garbage collection (gc), the snippet above will eat up...
July 2010
4 posts
Why My Next Mac App Will Not Use Garbage...
Among the many things I have learned from the past few years’ experience of developing desktop applications, here’s one: Implement your app conservatively. This often translates to using only proven technologies. Cocoa’s garbage collection (gc), alas, does not seem to be one of them. My next Mac app will not use garbage collection. In fact, we are actually even taking the pain of...
LadyBugz 1.5 →
My company’s FogBugz client application for Mac, LadyBugz, has a new version. We have given the case history view a facelift, along with many improvements and bug fixes. We weren’t sure if we were on the right direction when we started to make the major interface change, so we asked a few of our customers if they’d like to try out a beta version. The initial response was...
June 2010
1 post
May 2010
2 posts
SQLite Turns 10
D. Richard Hipp, creator of SQLite, in sqlite-users mailing list:
Some of the code in SQLite (such as the Lemon parser generator and the printf implementation) dates back to the late 1980s. But the core of SQLite was not started until 10 years ago. Ten years is not that long ago, though it has been long enough to amass 7114 check-ins - an average of 2.1 check-ins per day. If you are...
Formosana, a Collection of C++ Libraries for...
Formosana is a C++ library collection that provides basic building blocks for processing Taiwanese languages. Currently three languages are supported: Mandarin, Holo and Hakka. It also provides a language-agnostic, bigram-based word segmentation library. It has no external dependencies and can be built on most platforms I know of. It is available on github under the MIT License.
My day job is...
April 2010
2 posts
Jamreilly: Lewis Thomas on the etymology of... →
The connection of soothe to yes is strange but true; it takes a bit of relaxing to get it straight in the mind. I suppose that if something is, and is true, and leads to nodding of the head, and brings the archaic response sooth, or the modern answer yes, it is a soothing experience. The truth is not always soothing, but in a better world it ought to be.
March 2010
2 posts
New Work: LadyBugz, a FogBugz Client for Mac
I’m happy that my company just released the version 1.0 of LadyBugz, a FogBugz client for Mac.
If you just heard FogBugz for the first time, it is a “bug and issue tracking, project management, help desk software” service. FogBugz is a product of FogCreek, one of whose founders is Joel Spolsky, the software luminary behind Joel on Software and Stack Overflow.
What Zonble...
LLVM Wallpaper and OS X's xattr
For the past few months I’ve been using this as my wallpaper/desktop background. I’m seldom a fan of any personality or any project, but hey it’s LLVM.
I finally found out the source of the picture. It’s made by putting the LLVM logo over one of Cocoia’s wallpapers.
How did I find out the source? I must have seen the link from some friend’s twitter long time...
February 2010
6 posts
The Afterbuzz
Jacqui Cheng of ars technica, my emphasis:
These swift and widespread changes to Buzz’s automatic-everything behaviors are certainly commendable, and it’s clear that Google does listen to user feedback in ways that other companies don’t. However, the sheer extent to which the company had to back off from its initial launch functionality goes to show how delusional Google was...
Reblog: A conversation Dan Wineman has every month...
mrgan:
Even if Flash were the world’s best-engineered animation and interaction technology (which, lol, it’s not) scorn would be heaped on it for what it has allowed people to do to restaurant websites.
That said, I recommend that you write a nice email to your local Flash-webbed business and suggest to them, as nicely as you can, that they offer a one-page summary of what you need to know:...
Imagine If Your Bank Did That to You...
This is from the leader article, “Who’s Afarid of Google?”, of The Economist, August 30, 2007, my emphasis:
Google is often compared to Microsoft (another enemy, incidentally); but its evolution is actually closer to that of the banking industry. Just as financial institutions grew to become repositories of people’s money, and thus guardians of private information about...
Thank You, Google, for Wasting One Hour of My...
As I said in a previous post, I turned off Google Buzz immediately when it was enabled onto my gmail account. I was annoyed by the fact that I was not asked to opt in, shocked by the fact that many of my email contacts were automatically added in, and deeply troubled by the fact that, from a quick glance, I have absolutely no control over the whole thing: access control and privacy level...
“Because in the business also known as social network, he who asketh not...”
– My reply to a friend’s comment on my tweet that I turned off Google Buzz. She asked, “Why can’t the world be simpler?” Above was my thought.
Social Network and Email Don't Go Together
I turned off Google Buzz the moment I saw its advertisement blocking my gmail page. And I had to google it to learn how to turn it off. And I thought only Yahoo! and Microsoft did stupid things when it comes to email.
People, your email is not your social network. Just because you own a phone number, that doesn’t mean you have to invite everyone you ever called to call you to say hello,...
January 2010
10 posts
iPad's Traditional Chinese Question
Many Taiwanese users, and I believe many Hong Kong users too, will wonder how iPad could be a useful device at all. Apple states on its tech specs that the initially supported languages include English, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Simplified Chinese and Russian. There is no Traditional Chinese.
Language support is a topic on its own in modern operating system. It is mainly...
World Average Number of Days to Start a Business:...
And Taiwan’s average is 23 days. Its overall economic freedom is ranked at the 27th in the world.
This via the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom.
I currently run my own company (as a corporation as defined in Taiwan business code) and have experience of having started a partnership (later helped its conversion to corporation). All small businesses (or “micro” businesses if using...
You use nil, I use NULL
It’s just zero, it’s just naught
But if you think a 0 is a NULL, you never heard something called SQL
The Remote Desktop Envy
For all the advantages of Mac OS X over Windows, there is one thing that my IT friends always sneer at: That OS X has the inferior remote desktop protocol.
Apple makes remote management quite easy. Its Apple Remote Desktop, although expensive, has great user interface and is indispensable if you manage over a bunch of machines. Since OS X 10.5, it has become even easier and cheaper if you just...
That Reblogging Thing
Tumblr’s reblogging design says a lot of its peculiarity.
I find it fun reading my Tumblr dashboard everyday, in an age where blog seems done and RSS in decline—established media and writers make it a norm, whereas the rest of us have moved on to “microblogging”. I find truly insightful writings and excellent blogs on Tumblr. It has a light mix of social network, like the...
Judgment of Plagiarism
I’m at the beginning of Richard Posner’s “The Little Book of Plagiarism” and I ran into this passage (locations 138-145 of the book1, emphasis original):
A judgment of plagiarism requires that the copying […] induce reliance by [the intended readers]. By this I mean that the reader does something because he thinks the plagiarizing work original that he would not have...
Logo in the Age of Instant Communication
Ignacio Vasallo, on logo and branding in our age:
It was the first time any country had created an abstract logo to brand itself but today everybody thinks that all you need to do to rebrand a country is make a logo.
I think that’s out of date. Logos are old fashioned. These days, you can communicate almost instantly with the world. And the internet means that message has got to be...
December 2009
4 posts
Late Start, Late End
In an interview (via @gruber), Scott Hansen a.k.a. ISO50:
What is a typical day like for you?
Late start, food, long bike ride, food, coffee, design, music, coffee, design, food/bar, music, late end.
The world would be a better place if more people did that, and people who already do that were more unapologetic about it.
New social networking rule
mrgan:
dwineman:
No one, under any circumstances, for any reason, is ever obligated to defend his or her “following” list to anybody.*
*Especially people who aren’t on it.
I don’t know what people expect to hear when they ask me why I don’t follow them on whatever website. The answer is simple and obvious: I don’t find what they’re saying interesting.
How I Choose a Blog Theme
When I choose a blog theme, there’s really one thing that really matters to me: block quotations.
I discovered that the criterion alone can filter out about 95% of the themes offered by a blog service or a theme chooser. Previously I attempted to use criteria such as font family (sans serif typefaces for blogging in English; serif ones for blogging in Traditional Chinese) or overall design...