High school. A group of friends who listened to nothing but Led Zeppelin for an entire summer. Procuring illegal adult beverages from “Joe D.” – a cook at a local Perkins Restaurant who would run out during work to buy the stuff, after he ate something off of returned plates from busboys. A campfire set up behind a local grade school, nestled tightly in a decent patch of woods. A “boom box” and a few cassette tapes… one which had Johnny Cash’s “The Ring of Fire” on it.

We’d all gather around the roaring blaze, and initiate the evening with a toast to that very song. And then bust out the Lowenbraü Special Dark, Michelob, etc. and jam to Led Zeppelin. Only on week nights.

We had shirts made up, and I was into pen & ink at the time. And Tolkien of course. I drew the board up and we got the shirts (white with baseball black sleeves). I quickly forgot all about it.

Today I checked Facebook, and the wife of one of my friends from that era changed her profile picture… to a photograph of the image on that board. “Flip” still has that board after all these many years. Hilarious!

Without any further ado:

A while ago I forked my development endeavors my tackling iPhone development. Coming to it from an AS3 background made some parts easier than others to assimilate. One of the things in AS3 is that you could have packages of classes, etc. in a project, but if they were not imported or included into class files actually implementing them, they wouldn’t compile into the SWF(s). That appears to not be the case in development for the iPhone/Mac.

Recently I was debugging a project on 1st generation Touches. And everything was working perfectly. I then began debugging and developing on a 2nd generation Touch. This had a higher version of iOS because it could actually run it. 1st generation Touches have fallen back because they don’t have enough horses under the hood to properly power later advances in iOS.

I began playing with a screen mirroring class that I planned on using to show my application’s UI on a big panel using an iPad dock connector to VGA adapter. So I wrote up the class and there it sat in my Project. I implemented the class in my app delegate.

Later I decided that I wouldn’t need it. So I removed the class import statement in my app delegate’s .m file, and I removed the setup method from the didFinishLaunchingWithOptions method. I thought nothing of it and carried on thinking that class would now be free from future compiles.

I compiled my application back onto a test 1st generation Touch (which doesn’t support UIScreenDidConnectNotification which is used in the screen mirroring class), and my application would crash with a

dyld: Symbol not found: _UIScreenDidConnectNotification
Referenced from: …/AppName.app/AppName
Expected in: /System/Library/Frameworks/UIKit.framework/UIKit

Hmmm. I removed the import and the method implementation. Did I need to clean the project because something was being cached? Tried that to no avail. Something was decidedly wrong. I googled the error and found a hit or two mentioning weak linking, etc. Tried that and obtained the same crashing results.

A quick jaunt over to the Apple Developer Forums was needed and I posted my problem there. After a bit of time I received my answer… category implementation. The fact that the class is in my project at all means it’s getting linked.

But what is a category? It’s an alternative to subclassing. You add methods to a class (remember the prototype days in AS2?) Any methods that are added to a class through a category become part of the class definition. Meaning ANY instance or subclass of the class will have access to the added methods. Cool, I hadn’t seen or knowingly run into this before. It’s great to know, but  was kicking me squarely in the balls because of my naivete. Again, good to know and can be quite useful!

I pulled the class guts of the screen mirroring class from an open-source class online. And guess what? It was using a category for UIApplication.

@interface UIApplication (ScreenMirroring)

But still, the fact that I wasn’t importing the class at all made me assume that it wouldn’t be compiled into the Target. What I was told on the forum:

The source code that makes the offending reference to UIScreenDidConnectNotification is still being compiled because it’s in a file that’s part of your project.

Well… does this mean if you write a bunch of throw-away classes in your project that you’re not using, they still get compiled into your Target(s)? It would appear so and is a break from the mindset I’ve had in project development for a long time, coming from a heavy AS3 background. I would consider this a gotcha. Perhaps something that those with a lot more Xcode experience would scoff at, but you could run into this situation as well. The fact that all the code in your project compiles is something I wasn’t aware of. Trim one’s projects.

No spoilers. The campaign is very rich, lush, and the lingo and voice acting are excellent. For the most part enemy AI isn’t too bad, but at times can get stuck standing around waiting for you to pop them in the pan. Also after a while I felt like I was merely shooting targets at a carnival… lined up waiting to be knocked down. The scenery changes but the effect is about the same. Crouch, zip zip zip in a horizontal path and you’re about done. Your comrades will take the others down. Looks pretty cool. Sounds great. Plays so-so. It is fun.

Online. Hmm. It’s not bad, but it’s not close to MW2. Not even half as good. I don’t know why this is. It doesn’t feel as smooth. The maps are meh. The weapons don’t exactly feel very good. If you don’t have a copy of MW2 around, or Halo Reach, it will do.

Might be neat. Here goes:

Notice the kotwica on the wall

So I started digging back into my Dio collection, missing Ronnie a little bit today, and I had a video of his from a long time ago, Rock and Roll Children. Not the best song, but I gave it a view and was startled to see a prominent kotwica there on the wall as graffiti.

For those who might not know, the kotwica (“anchor”) was created in 1942 by members of of the AK Wawer unit (small sabotage) as a symbol for the Polish struggle to regain independence. It was quick and easy to spray paint on walls, much to the occupying German force’s displeasure. The meaning of “PW” initially was “Pomścimy Wawer” (“We will avenge Wawer”). The Wawer massacre was considered to be one of the first large scale massacres of Polish civillians by Nazi Germany in Poland.

You can slyly get your nom nom on when you’re at your next Flash conference and things have you feeling a little bored.

You know just about everyone there has a cool messenger bag stuffed with their laptop, schedule, Android device, Snickers bar, moleskine tomes and various collected swag. But you can surprise everyone with this cool little messenger bag.

Bust out a blanket, some wine (or better scotch), and perhaps some take out containers from the local Thai culinary establishment. No one will have seen it coming, although they might have smelled it coming.

Get your MVC action on while relaxing and meeting new friends over adult beverages and some curried flesh – and be the envy of the entire room!

Gorgeous

It’s not very often when I come across a modern artist that piques my attention, especially one that works in something other than graphite or oil paint. It’s just how I am wired, a little old fashioned in this regard. For instance I really can’t stand museums of modern art, 99.9% of the time I just don’t get it or see the talent pouring out of the work.

Today I stumbled upon the magnificent work of artist Jae-Hyo Lee. It’s a little hard to describe it, but I am really drawn to his wood & nail compositions. On first glance things look hammered into the surface, but it’s much, much more than that. To quote a gallery in regards to one of his pieces (“0121-1110=106062″):

Jae-Hyo Lee’s wood sculptures reveal both the unique organic quality of the natural material and the intervention of the artist’s hand. Carved from a solid slab of wood, hundreds of nails are hammered into the surface and then carefully bent to create patterns that evoke the ripples of water or currents of air.

After scorching the entire surface of the work to achieve a rich black patina, Lee grinds the nails, exposing the raw silver metal in order to “draw a picture on wood using nails,” according to the artist. He sees this process as a metaphor for both physical labor and the way in which such labor can create beauty.

His website (thumbnails work, but larger images are broken at the moment). Check out all of the amazing things he’s created… seeing these images (small) online does them no justice. It’s mathematical, it’s freeform, it’s constrained, it’s dark and light, etc. I just find it really magical.

Core77 website.

I must be pretty daft to nearly lose my mind every time I want to use NSNotificationCenter on the iPhone… for uses beyond a basic method call someplace in the wild. I want to send information. I am posting this only because when it’s been a while since I’ve used them, and I seem to forget what I am doing and end up figuring it out all over again. Each time. So this post is reference for me.

If you haven’t used them before, this may help you along. This doesn’t send an object along, but it could (just change the nil to something useful for you).

In a class that is doing the yelling:

NSDictionary *dict;
dict = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys: yourStuff, nil];
[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] postNotificationName:@”someString” object:nil userInfo:dict];

In the class doing the listening:

[[NSNotificationCenter defaultCenter] addObserver:self selector:@selector(someMethod: ) name:@”someString” object:nil];
…
- (void)someMethod:(NSNotification *)notification {
NSDictionary *tmp = notification.userInfo;
//You could access notification.object here too
}

That’s about it really… stuff that userInfo with as much as you’d like within reason and have fun. NSNotificationCenter is really a fun way of yelling to whomever you want listening without worrying about scope. It’s quick and painless (unless like me – you had to track down using userInfo and/or object).

Happy Monday. Now, where is the nearest purveyor of hot liquid caffeine…

I suppose I could have just tossed this over to Flickr but I thought this was pretty awesome. An enormous 12-sided dice I stumbled upon.