Category Archives: Uncategorized

When security procedures go bad

My password with my bank may as well be “I can’t remember, can we go through the security questions please?” That’s my answer so many times when they ask, and every time it gets me in via a slightly tedious … Continue reading

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“You could simply do X” costs more

Someone always says it. “Could you just add this?” or “I don’t think it would be too hard to…” or if somebody else “changes these two simple things”, someone might create a completely bug-compatible, scale-compatible implementation of this other, undocumented … Continue reading

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How to version a Mach-O library

Yes, it’s the next instalment of “cross-platform programming for people who don’t use Macs very much”. You want to give your dynamic library a version number, probably of the format major.minor.patchlevel. Regardless of marketing concerns, this helps with dependency management … Continue reading

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Anyone Can Write A Manifesto And You Can Too!™

Over a small number of years, I have helped to write some software. During this time I have come to value: Solving problems over rejecting what has passed before Solving problems over congratulating ourselves Solving problems over creating problems Solving … Continue reading

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Detecting overflows, undefined behaviour and other nasties

You will remember that a previous post discussed what happens when you add one to an integer, and that the answer isn’t always obvious. Indeed, the answer isn’t always defined. As it happens, there are plenty of weird cases that … Continue reading

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An open letter to Xcode

The post below has been filed verbatim as an Apple Developer Tools bug report with ID 13051064. Dear Xcode, imagine that you had a combine harvester. Only, this combine harvester, instead of having a hopper into which the winnowed wheat … Continue reading

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How big is an integer?

In the beginning, when all was without form and void, Kernighan and Ritchie created char. And they said, “let it be of a size chosen by the compiler, guaranteed to be large enough to hold one character from the execution … Continue reading

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How to excel at IDE design

When people have the “which IDE is best” argument, what they’re actually discussing is “which slightly souped-up monospace text editor with a build button do you like using”. Eclipse, Xcode, IntelliJ, Visual Studio…all of these tools riff on the same … Continue reading

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Supporting both ARC and MRC build settings

Let’s face it, people don’t read `README`s. If you write library code that people are going to use in their own projects, you can’t rely on that bit at the bottom of the documentation that tells people to do -fobjc-arc … Continue reading

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Automate all the server Objective-C!

I decided it was time to stop writing WebObjects/GNUstepWeb code, and write some code that would make it easier to write WO/GSW code. With that in mind I replaced my previous component generator with a more robust generator. I also … Continue reading

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