For some reason, CDs occasionally don’t automount for me on my iMac. Luckily that’s easy to work around:
[…]
/dev/disk3
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: CD_partition_scheme Audio CD *620.3 Mi disk3
[…]
kalevala:~ leeg$ diskutil mountDisk disk3
Volume(s) mounted successfully
Job is, as they say, a good ‘un.
Title linkies to a post by an F-Script guy (the F-Script guy? I’m not sure, I don’t really follow F-Script development) about nice things he likes about the Objective-C language. Remembering that he wrote a Smalltalk scripting environment for Cocoa, some of the list is fairly unsurprising, much is made of the dynamic runtime, multiple-level dispatch and so on. I think the article is mainly bang on, though I do disagree with the author in a few places. The next paragraph is not one of those places.
Classes are objects. ++ This is the coolest thing ever about proper object-oriented languages, and one of my strongest arguments for design patterns are not language independent. Do patterns such as Prototype need to exist in ObjC code, when the Factory Method +new will give you an unconfigured typical instance?
Dynamic typing… Optional static typing. This is one of those slippery slopes where both edges are sharp enough to give you the rope required to shoot yourself in the foot. Duck typing (i.e. if an object looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck…) is useful in some cases and damned annoying in others. To avoid runtime exceptions with duck typing you either have to [i]mentally assert correctness in your code, [ii]perform all the runtime introspection needed to ensure your messages will be handled, or [iii]eschew the duck type completely and downcast to either an instance of a class or a conformant of a protocol (or both; you could do something like GLModelObject <NSCoding> * if you really felt like it). Another issue with the ObjC implementation of duck typing is that it doesn’t always work as you’d think. When it does work, it’s very powerful – when it doesn’t, you probably won’t find out until runtime, and could be spending a long while working out what happened.
Categories. No, afraid not. Nice idea, badly implemented. The point of categories is to let you decorate a class with additional functionality by adding methods – currently not ivars – in additional code objects, not all of which need be present at launch. This lets you work around the visibility contract of the class (can’t see an @private ivar? Just chuck an instance method in!), though in fairness so does KVC. But perhaps the worst crime a category can commit is killing someone else’s category. Or overwriting an “undecorated” method.
I still love Objective-C, mainly because I love Cocoa and GNUstep and making code that works like them, it’s definitely powerful and fun too. But it’s not without its rough edges and sharp spiky bits.
<
p>For some reason, even though l10n and i18n have been fashionable terms in computing for the last few years, no-one seems able to localise properly into the lingua franca of computing, English. It may surprise some readers to learn that there’s more than one dialect of english, and some of these even have their own ISO codes (such as en_GB, en_US and so on…I’m ignoring the "ang" language for now). Some words in these different dialects are not spelled in the same way. I live in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (Land of hope and glory, mother of the free…) and therefore those round things are known as discs. Indeed, when I insert my Mac OS X installer disc, it is called “Mac OS X Install Disc 1”. Then I launch the Firmware Password application, which tells me: “The firmware password is used to prevent others from starting your computer with a different disk.” Gah!
Due to a lack of digit extraction I’m not at FOSDEM this weekend. That’s unfortunate because as well as catching up with my friends at Brainstorm and on GNUstep, I really enjoyed the weekend last year and drank plenty of great Belgian beer and ate plenty of nice moules-frites.
So I’ve been spiritually living the Free lifestyle by reading what RMS and Torvalds have to say. Mostly I’ve been going over the essays in Free Software, Free Society. I find it very easy to accept the premises RMS uses, easy to follow, comprehend and agree with the arguments he presents but then somehow (perhaps for illogical reasons on my part, his part or both) hard to agree that the conclusions he draws are inevitable.
For instance, I agree that copyright law exists directly to benefit the public, and indirectly to benefit the authors (by providing incentives for authors in the shape of limited term monopoly over their authored content) and not at all to benefit Industry Associations. It even says that here, in the first ever copyright law: …for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books; May it please Your Majesty, that it may be Enacted…
certainly doesn’t seem to mention greedy lawyers or management.
Letters patent were never created for the same reason, of course. But because it became clear that patents from the Crown were obtained uppon Misinformacions and untrue pretences of publique good, many such Graunts have bene undulie obteyned and unlawfullie putt in execucion, to the greate Greevance and Inconvenience of your Majesties Subjects, contrary to the Lawes of this your Realme, and contrary to your Majesties royall and blessed Intencion soe published
, so the whole system was rebooted so that patents were only grantable … to the true and first Inventor and Inventors of such Manufactures, […] soe as alsoe they be not contrary to the Lawe nor mischievous to the State, by raisinge prices of Commodities at home, or hurt of Trade, or generallie inconvenient…
.
The situation we find ourselves in now is that industries claim copyrights and inventions from the authors and inventors and lobby for more and more restrictive variants of the above laws, ignoring the previously-granted rights of the public at large and extending the previously-ungranted rights of the rights-owners, simultaneously removing those rights from the people granted the rights in the first place. So why in the case of copyright do the FSF assume copyright, but in the case of patents they refuse to deal with them? That inconsistency I don’t understand.
From the title linky: " Mobility is only available for Windows and Linux." Good job no-one bases their mobile appliances on Mac OS X ;-)
It’s getting there, now has the ability to display load commands (though it only reports useful information for LC_SEGMENT and LC_SEGMENT_64 commands):
Again the screenshot depicts the OmniDazzle binary for no reason other than it’s a nontrivial file. The directions in which to take the filesystem are now numerous: I can add info about the remaining load commands (v. useful), the raw data for each segment (somewhat useful), and the sections in each segment (v. useful). Whether the filesystem will eventually get to the level of symbol resolution, I’m not sure :-).
When looking through some of the configuration options on my laptop (well, it’s either that or go to the pub and socialise with humans) I came across something I couldn’t account — pardon the pun — for. A new user account on the system, short name messagebus, full name "Message Bus" user id 506. Now messagebus looks like the name of a system daemon user, but that full name looks like some clueless skiddie made a mistake creating the user account, especially as the uid is that of a regular user. That’s the kind of mistake no self-respecting installer would make.
So, what had this phantom user done? Well, thankfully, nothing. Neither the shell nor home directory was real, and wtmp/utmp showed no activity. Neither did the ssh logs – but in looking for them I realised that I don’t actually use ssh on the box, so turned it off.
Anyway, it turned out to be an innocuous issue – the MacPorts installer for dbus creates this bogus user, which I’ve since deleted. This Apple forums discussion explains more.
It needs some polishing and more functionality before I’d call it useful, then I have to find out whether I’m allowed to do anything with the source code ;-). But this is at least quite a cool hack; exploring a Mach-O file (thin or fat – in this case, I used the OmniDazzle executable which is a fat file) as if it’s a file system. FUSE of course makes it easy, so thanks to Amit Singh for the port!
One reason that microkernels win over everything else (piss off, Linus) is that stability is better, because less stuff is running in the dangerous and all-powerful kernel environment. MacFUSE, like FUSE implementations on other UNIX-like operating systems, takes the microkernel approach to filesystems, hooking requests for information out of the kernel and passing them to user-space processes to handle. Here’s the worst that can happen when screwing up a FUSE filesystem:
Now that might sound not only like a recipe for lower-quality code, but also like I’m extolling the capability to create lower-quality code. Well no it isn’t, and yes I am. The advantage is that now the develop-debug-fix cycle for filesystems is just as short as it is for other userland applications (and HURD translators and the like). This provides a lower barrier to entry (meaning that it’s more likely that interesting and innovative filesystems can be created), but also a faster turnaround on bugfixes (no panic, restart, try to salvage panic log… no two-machine debugging with kdb…) so ultimately higher-quality filesystems.
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p>The justification for the iPod Touch upgrade fee (to enable the new apps, which are actually deployed-but-disabled by a free firmware upgrade) is the same as the justification given for the MacBook wireless upgrade fee last year – that adding new features to a product that isn’t sold as a subscription service needs to be charged for. That in itself is odd – it means that the regulators in the States get to set a price (if not the price) for hitherto free products offered by companies. But it raises a more interesting question – what constitutes a new feature? If a bugfix renders a previously-unusable feature usable, is that charged for? If a security fix makes it possible to use a system in a different environment, should that be charged for?
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
